GWT 2.10 release?

[Colin Alworth]

We've got a few changes that have been brewing or waiting to be made available, and it sounds like it is about time to collectively push to make these things happen. Given the nature of some of these, I am suggesting that they not be folded into a bugfix release, but instead that the next release be 2.10.0.

Changing Maven Central groupId

One of the big ones is work to migrate off of the "com.google.gwt" groupId (note that we are not adjusting packages) and into our own namespace in maven, "org.gwtproject.gwt". Google's efforts to open sourcing and encourage GWT has been very accommodating for the community, and this change is long past due, so that releases of GWT do not need someone with access to the com.google groupId in Maven Central to perform the release process for us. If successful, this will be the final release which uses the old groupId.

To that end, Thomas Broyer has done a lot of work to make sure this path will be as smooth as possible. That work can be seen discussed in the mailing list and in a github repo he wrote to demonstrate approaches and their relative merits. No final summary was officially posted, but from discussions in gitter chat, the cleanest proposed option is to follow Experiment #3 for today, and optionally later to roll out the last two options to more easily facilitate updates from older releases.

This means that the next release will be performed first on org.gwtproject, and then later we will request that someone at Google perform the final com.google.gwt release, consisting only of pom files that indicate relocation to the new groupId. Applications and dependencies will need to switch to this new groupId over time, but in theory at least, using the researched relocation mechanism should make that fairly painless.

Finally, I suggest that any release candidate that goes out only exist on org.gwtproject, to avoid needing to iterate with com.google releases, in case we end up needing more than one RC in the release process.

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Chrome debugging bugs

There are a few changes in Chrome made over the last year or so that impact GWT development and debugging in various ways. https://gwt-review.googlesource.com/c/gwt/+/23500 fixes SDM (and cross origin apps) stack traces being lost, and unhandledrejection events are entirely lost in some cases. https://gwt-review.googlesource.com/c/gwt/+/23580 tracks a newer change in Chrome dev tools, where the unofficial Function.displayName property no longer works when debugging obfuscated code with GWT's -XmethodNameDisplayMode flag, and transitions to the standard Function.name property instead.

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IE8/IE9/IE10 removal

Another thread on this mailing list tracks the ongoing discussion of removing three end-of-life'd browsers from GWT. It has been suggested that IE11 support remain for at least a little while longer. According to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/internet-explorer-microsoft-edge, IE11 as a desktop application will no longer be supported after June 2022, though that may change, and even if it does not, it may make sense to continue support for some time after that.

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Dropping Java 7 support, and upgrading Jetty 9 and HtmlUnit

Building GWT itself with something newer than Java 8 is going to require additional work (see https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/issues/9683), but the time has come to no longer support Java 7, and require 8 as the minimum version for building and using GWT. I have a work in progress patch which upgrades both Jetty 9 and HtmlUnit to their latest respective versions in order to deal with several issues affecting each. I am holding out for one last fix in HtmlUnit before disabling the two tests it affects (note that this is still a net win, about a dozen tests are now passing that weren't previously).

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Other changes already in HEAD-SNAPSHOT can be seen at https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/compare/2.9.0...master.

[mcmi...@gmail.com]

Sound greats +1

[Matt Davis]

awesome +1

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[Dmitrii Tikhomirov]

Thank a millon, looks great ! +1

[Rocco De Angelis]

Nice +1 

[Juan Pablo Gardella]

@co...@colinalworth.com  do yo know any ETA on this?

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[Colin Alworth]

I'm looking for reviewers and help for the above issues so I can finalize them and begin testing. There are a few dependency chains here - I have IE8/9/10 removal just about complete, but before that can merge we need the apichecker updated, and after that merges, we can remove the poorly performing java.util.Date.fixDaylightSavings call. Likewise before htmlunit/jetty can be upgraded, Java 7 support must be dropped and the new jars put in the tools repo.

Here are reviews currently waiting for someone to take a look:

• Fix Chrome+SDM stack traces https://gwt-review.googlesource.com/c/gwt/+/23500
• Fix Chrome -XmethodDisplayName https://gwt-review.googlesource.com/c/gwt/+/23580
• Provide GWT 2.9.0 apicheck jars https://github.com/gwtproject/tools/pull/22
• Permit GWT 2.10.0 breaking api changes https://gwt-review.googlesource.com/c/gwt/+/23680 (depends on tools#22)
  
• Drop support for Java 7 https://gwt-review.googlesource.com/c/gwt/+/23700

After these start to land (to avoid too many at a time), will be the following:

• Drop IE8/9/10 support (depends on review 23680 above)
• Improve java.util.Date performance in both gwt2 and j2cl (depends on dropping IE8/9)
• Add latest HtmlUnit/Jetty to gwtproject/tools
  
• Update Htmlunit/Jetty to latest (depends on dropping java7 support and htmlunit/jetty being in tools) - this is somewhat incomplete, there are two dev mode tests that are failing, and jetty-env.xml is not presently loaded correctly
• Add Github Actions support - this depends on the patch which drops Java 7 support due to some issue in running the validation tests in that environment. I'm attempting to replicate build.gwtproject.org except in a way that is visible, and can deploy snapshots to the org.gwtproject groupId when we're ready for that.
  

If you have +2 permissions in the review site, I'd appreciate a look at some of these, if you are interested in trying out the patches and giving a +1 that would help other reviewers as well.

[eliasb...@gmail.com]

Great , +1

[P.G.Taboada]

I created a BUG report for intellij

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-296473/GWT-210-Release