[Software] Shadow over Fedora 34 as maintainer of Java packages quits with some choice words for Red Hat and Eclipse.

[S9OUL.]

Fedora 34, a feature-packed new release of Red Hat's leading edge Linux distribution, was released today, though the main Java package maintainer has quit, urging "affected maintainers to drop dependencies on Java."

Fedora 34 is used by Red Hat to try out new features that are likely to end up in first CentOS Stream and then Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the commercial offering.

What is new in Fedora 34? The full list of changes is here and includes:

btrfs (B-tree file system), which has been the default for Fedora Workstation since Fedora 33, will now have transparent zstd (Zstandard) compression

For audio, PipeWire will be used instead of PulseAudio and JACK - Systemd-oomd, which aims to mitigate out of memory conditions, will be on by default

The LLVM toolchain is updated to version 12 with all its sub-projects - The Ruby language is updated from 2.7 to 3.0, and the Ruby on Rails framework to 6.1

Wayland will be used by default for KDE editions of Fedora (it is already the default for GNOME)

The desktop is GNOME 40, described by Fedora project leader Matthew Miller as "the first time since GNOME 3.0 came out that there's a real rethinking of the basic desktop experience."

Of these, the introduction of GNOME 40 will be the most visible to users, and the switch to PipeWire should improve audio handling significantly.

Fedora program manager Ben Cotton revealed yesterday that Release Candidate (RC) 1.2 was approved for final release today – though the speed of the approval, with just five hours between the completion of the RC and the meeting to approve it, has caused concern. Cotton has said that he is "starting the conversation about how to prevent this in the future."

 

 

Spoiling the celebrations, Fedora's main Java package maintainer Fabio Valentini said yesterday: "I can no longer in good conscience be the primary maintainer of (most) Java packages in Fedora."

It is worse than that; in a post entitled "The Death of Java (packages)" he said "new versions and even security issues have been piling up for months," that "Java package maintainers from Red Hat have been exceptionally unhelpful, and have not substantially contributed to Java packages in Fedora in years," that the Eclipse Java-based IDE (the packages for which are maintained by someone else) is a "dumpster fire" and that "I see no way for the situation to improve."

Valentini decided to orphan "all Java packages I am the main admin of" adding that "since this is the majority of remaining Java software in Fedora … I expect a decent amount of dependent packages will be affected." His solution is to "urge affected maintainers to drop dependencies on Java, if at all possible."

Cup of Java bitter for many

Miller and Cotton thanked him for his efforts, while others indicated agreement that maintaining Java is particularly burdensome.

"This is a task that has burned out many people (including me)," said Aleksandar Kurtakov from the Red Hat Eclipse team; while Ankur Sinha from the neuro-sig group (neuroscience research) said "the neuro-sig reached a similar conclusion - that they're just too much work or just pretty much impossible to keep in Fedora. We've now accepted that documenting Java tools and asking users to install them directly from upstream is the most we can manage."