Governance meeting Nov 3, 2021

[Mark Waite]

Proposed agenda for today's governance meeting:

Agenda:

• News

  • Security release tomorrow - 2.319 and 2.303.3

  • Next LTS baseline selected - 2.319

  • Guava update has merged, will be in 2.320

  • Hacktoberfest summary blog posted

  • Static HTML wiki.jenkins.io is online

    • Docker image with redirects through nginx

    • Content can be edited from GitHub repo

• Elections status report

  • 74 registered voters

  • Registration ends Nov 7, 2021

[the.n...@gmail.com]

I'm sorry I missed the meeting. I wanted to bring up that JGit 6 is moving to Java 11 as the minimum support version. This will have downstream impacts on Jenkins Java 8 support. What I am hoping is that we can retain 5.x for the time being so that Jenkins can still be used in commercial settings (note that there is a licensing change from Oracle for Java between 8 and 11 that changes the permitted use). The clause was reverted at 17, which is where my team went for new development that does not have to be deployed any time soon.

-Randall

[Mark Waite]

On Thu, Nov 4, 2021 at 1:46 PM Randall Becker wrote:

I'm sorry I missed the meeting. I wanted to bring up that JGit 6 is moving to Java 11 as the minimum support version. This will have downstream impacts on Jenkins Java 8 support. What I am hoping is that we can retain 5.x for the time being so that Jenkins can still be used in commercial settings (note that there is a licensing change from Oracle for Java between 8 and 11 that changes the permitted use). The clause was reverted at 17, which is where my team went for new development that does not have to be deployed any time soon.

Thanks for sharing your concern.  The git client plugin will remain with JGit 5 even if the JGit project releases JGit 6.  The git client plugin is installed on 95% of the 290,000 Jenkins installations that are reporting statistics back to the Jenkins stats server.  Last results hinted that less than 50% of those installations are running Java 11.

We won't let the git client plugin depend on a JGit release that would block a significant portion of the Jenkins installed base from using the git client plugin.

When JGit 6 releases and requires Java 11, the Jenkins project will remain with JGit 5.  We've been on older versions of JGit before.  We'll do it again.

Mark Waite

 

[Jesse Glick]

On Thu, Nov 4, 2021 at 6:00 PM Mark Waite <mark.ea...@gmail.com> wrote:

less than 50% of those installations are running Java 11.

We won't let the git client plugin depend on a JGit release that would block a significant portion of the Jenkins installed base

As usual in these discussions, statistics about how many installations currently use Java 11 only provide a lower bound. We have no measurements (that I am aware) of what portion of administrators currently running Java 8 would refuse to switch to 11 if a newer version of Jenkins required it, and would instead elect to stay on an older Jenkins release (and older plugins) indefinitely.

Anyway, I think the point is that Jenkins core currently supports Java 8, and so any commonly used plugin needs to support it as well unless and until that changes.