Bug#897945: #897945 still present/breaks with Java 8

[Per Lundberg]

On 1/29/19 3:36 PM, Markus Koschany wrote:

> We usually ship only with one JDK per release because of security
> support. OpenJDK 8 will be EOL before the end of the Debian 10 release
> cycle. We still have a couple of packages that will not compile with
> OpenJDK 11 hence we also thought about shipping OpenJDK 8 for building
> those packages but declaring it as unsupported at runtime. However, as
> this bug report shows, people tend to assume that OpenJDK 8 is supported
> as well.

Yes, it's easy to get this impression and I think it'll get even worse 
when more people start using Buster.

> So we either end up without OpenJDK 8 in Buster at all and with
> less packages, that are only there to build other packages, or we
> declare OpenJDK 8 as unsupported at runtime in our release notes which
> carries the risk of nobody reading them.

I think that risk is significant. If we go that route, I would suggest a 
postinst/debhelper message saying that "OpenJDK 8 is included but 
unsupported. Many packages will not work with it. Use at your own risk." 
or something similar.

But removing it altogether is probably less cumulative work for the 
whole Debian team in the long run, so I think that option should be 
strongly considered. It will also increase the motivation for people to 
fix the broken packages to build correctly on OpenJDK 11... :-)

(Do we have a list of these packages btw?)

Best regards,
--
Per