Dropping the Servlet-only distribution

[Brian Stansberry]

I'm interested in hearing from anyone who is using the "Servlet-only distribution" that, along with the standard full WildFly distribution and the WildFly Preview distribution, is available at https://www.wildfly.org/downloads/.

This distribution predates the introduction of Galleon into WildFly, and served as a way to get a much slimmer variant of WildFly. But now with Galleon you can provision a server with the layers you need, so I don't think there's a clear need for this distribution.

Our release download numbers show very little use of this, and I suspect a fair amount of what we see may be tools pulling down all our releases, and not actual in-the-wild use.

The WildFly developers have had a number of discussions over the years about no longer providing this distribution, and with all the other changes coming in WildFly this year (more on that in a separate post later) I think WildFly 27 or 28 might be a good time to stop producing this distribution. Its existence adds a non-trivial amount of complexity and overhead to our development work.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Best regards,

Brian Stansberry

WildFly Project Lead

He/Him/His