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DebConf25 Java/JVM BoF report

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Hi,

Thank you to all those who participated to the Java/JVM BoF two weeks 
ago at DebConf25.

As with many things at this DebConf it was a bit chaotic to start but a 
fallback was quickly worked out and we could proceed with all 10 
participants, 8 on site and 2 remote on Jitsi.

After a round of introduction we discussed the following items:

* build tools — I did a quick recap of where we currently were with the 
upgrades of Gradle and Kotlin, and Vladimir added a few words about his 
own contribution to this work. Work on some other popular build tools 
such as sbt and Bazel is also on the radar.


* IDEs — Vladimir reported that JetBrains is planning some changes in 
the distribution of IDEA [1] that may make it easier to package. As the 
same open source base is used for Android Studio and the source package 
already exists in Debian, we are certainly going to look at what else 
would be needed to build a working IDE at some point in the future.

[1]: 
https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2025/07/intellij-idea-unified-distribution-plan/

Then we considered the Eclipse IDE, and whether attempting to package it 
is a worthy and realistic goal. Emmanuel said that this project is too 
large to be properly packaged and maintained with our current resources 
and I agree with him: proper integration is complex, and it's 
tentacular, so it's likely to amount to a full-time job.

Mechtilde suggested that Debian could provide an installer script in 
contrib to help users install Eclipse quickly. Alex proposed that 
instead of providing the Eclipse IDE in Debian, detailed wiki pages 
could be written to help users to properly install the IDE on a Debian 
system. [Note: a page already exists [2] but it's probably incomplete 
and outdated.]

[2]: https://wiki.debian.org/Eclipse


* JDKs — Trixie will ship the JDK 21 (LTS), and unstable already 
features an Early Access preview of the next LTS (25) to be released in 
September. Vladimir performed a mass rebuild of Java packages [3] with 
it and ended up with only 39 build failures, much less than in the 
previous migration to 21 (146).

[3]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2025/07/msg00000.html

During DebCamp I was told that some people believe that the JDKs 
provided by Debian are not fit for use in production as they are only 
"reference implementations", and they would like Debian to ship the 
Eclipse (previously Adoptium) Temurin builds instead. This would have 
some benefits (as Temurin is known and used by popular build tools and 
IDEs) but it's probably not possible because the Debian policy is likely 
to conflict with the Temurin trademark policy. Instead I suggested that 
we study and document the differences between both builds (that are 
probably pretty similar) and eventually work on minimizing the 
divergences.

I shared again my intention to reintroduce legacy LTS JDKs to the stable 
distribution for the purpose of building and testing packages, with no 
formal security support and appropriate disclaimers. Matthias would be 
fine with that. I still have to validate this plan with Moritz.


* transitions — from a trusted source (online references missing) I 
learned that it will soon be possible to do proper transitions [4] with 
Architecture: all packages (such as Java libraries). An update to the 
transition tracker is on the way, and scheduling binNMUs will be 
possible.

As a reminder:

> The Release Team considers everything a transition where the upload of 
> a package requires changes (rebuilds or actual patches) to reverse 
> dependencies.

[4]: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam/Transitions


* autopkgtests — they are on the radar too. Currently too much breakage 
caused by updates is detected (too) late; autopkgtests would help to 
detect issues sooner and take appropriate decisions. In some cases there 
are only a few dependencies that are missing to be able to run the 
upstream test suites.


* reproducible builds — the current trend is to have build tools (such 
as Gradle, but also Maven) validate cryptographic signatures of 
dependencies at build time. A way to build signed artifacts would be to 
have them signed by the maintainer and the signature(s) committed to the 
package source before upload: this would in practice enforce a strictly 
reproducible build between the developer system and the CI (though a way 
to fail the package build if the signature doesn't match has yet to be 
implemented).

Does Gradle fulfill the requirements for reproducible builds? Yes: 
features were included into this build tool to make it possible to build 
reproducibly with it.


* helping and Debian Java Documentation — documentation is outdated and 
users/developers/maintainers don't know where to look for. The Java 
Policy is due for some updates as well.

The Debian Go Packaging Team pages [5] are IMO an interesting example of 
how a "team portal" could be structured.

[5]: https://go-team.pages.debian.net/

To make the #debian-java IRC channel more welcoming for newcomers and 
discussions, it was proposed to move the gitlab notifications out of it 
to a separate channel and reduce their verbosity [and this was since 
done by lavamind — thank you!].

There is also the team blog [6] that hasn't been updated since 2019. I'm 
planning to post updates on major milestones of build tool upgrades, and 
it would be nice if someone else could prepare a post about "what's new 
in Trixie" summarizing the changes in and around Java packages that are 
about to be released.

[6]: https://java.debian.net/blog/


* next meeting — a quarterly video call on Jitsi? This was suggested and 
most participants seemed interested. For the first meeting I've started 
a poll [7] to figure out which days would be preferred in the range 
September 10 to 23, then by late August I will run another poll to 
choose a day and time within the most popular days.

[7]: https://beta.framadate.org/polls/92ae6badb5f59bf80f21


* group picture — unfortunately I wasn't able to convince my phone front 
camera to focus on the group behind me so we get ... an unvoluntarily 
privacy-preserving picture? [8] (I really should have taken more 
pictures with me completely out of the field then stitch them, but I 
didn't think about that at the time.) Sorry about that, but anyway here 
it is.

[8]: 
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/114/955/272/469/556/489/original/f8248965003bb8e4.jpg


Cheers,

-- 
Julien Plissonneau Duquène

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DebConf25 Java/JVM BoF report Julien Plissonneau Duquène <sre4ever@free.fr> - 2025-08-01 22:10 +0200
  update: 2025Q3 meeting date+time poll Julien Plissonneau Duquène <sre4ever@free.fr> - 2025-08-02 00:20 +0200
  Re: DebConf25 Java/JVM BoF report Martijn Verburg <martijnverburg@gmail.com> - 2025-08-04 01:00 +0200
    Re: DebConf25 Java/JVM BoF report Julien Plissonneau Duquène <sre4ever@free.fr> - 2025-08-04 17:20 +0200

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