ANN - Java 11 general availability heads-up
Oleg Nenashev
Dear all,
I would like to follow-up on the last week’s Governance and Platform SIG meetings and to summarize the Java 11 support status.
TL;DR: Everything looks good, we plan to officially announce the GA this week in the weekly release and in the incoming Jenkins LTS 2.164.1. Java 8 will be still supported and offered by default, so Java 11 is opt-in.
Quick status:
In December we have announced the preview availability of Java 11. Here is a discussion in the dev list: link.
Starting from that, the Java 11 Support Team was working on testing, test automation, bug fixing and processing of early adopter reports
Java 11 Support team has also resolved major UX issues by introducing a new JAXB plugin and enhancing tooling to make it a detached plugin on Java 11 only
In Jenkins 2.164 we have performed a silent launch of Java 11 support. Users can run with Java 11 though it has not been officially announced yet
You can find the detailed status in the Platform SIG meeting doc. Readiness checklist:
Features - OK
All planned changes from JENKINS-51805 have been integrated
Testing - OK
Core tests are passing, ATH is passing, PCT is passing. Few regressions are reported and documented in the compatibility notes
All test tools have been updated to support testing with Java 11 in 2.164+ edition
Documentation - OK
Compatibility issues - OK
We have a number of known issues: Performance Signature Dynatrace Plugin, Ruby VM Plugin, and minor issues in Javadoc and JobDSL plugins
Javadoc release is in the progress, JobDSL will be fixed later
Platform SIG agreed that other issues are NOT blocking the release. Ruby Runtime is the most critical issue, but there is a plan to deprecate the Ruby-written plugin ecosystem all together (JEP-7)
We also have some “feature decay” (e.g. Java Web Start Removal, Lack of Java 11 installer in the JDK Tool Plugin), but all these cases have better solutions or workarounds documented in Upgrade Guidelines.
There is an action item on Mark to update upgrade guidelines to list these known issues
Packaging - OK
WAR files can run with both Java 8 and Java 11
Docker packaging is available for Java 11
Unix installers provided by the Jenkins project do not require Java 8 specifically
Windows installer still bundles Java 8 (Alex Earl is working on the new installer), but it is possible to change the Java version after the installation
Announcement - OK
Blogpost draft: https://github.com/jenkins-infra/jenkins.io/pull/2141 -- reviews welcome
If you see that something is missing, please respond to this thread. Any feedback will be appreciated.
Best regards,
Oleg Nenashev
Java 11 Support Team