Score:1

why were openjdk 14 and 13 removed from the repos

cn flag

Today, my CI/CD pipelines died because we maintain several applicatiins which depend on Java 14. Looking at the logs, I saw that their dependencies could not be fulfilled, since they depend on java 14.

Indeed, it seems to have recently been removed from the (focal) repos. The only thing I can find is:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openjdk-14/+bug/1934892

I would love to know why it has been removed and if there is a PPA I can use for Java14. Thanks

David avatar
cn flag
Wrong place to ask no one here works for the company.
cn flag
I think this is quite a narrow interpretation.
Kulfy avatar
mz flag
@Nmath I don't agree that the question is off-topic. Essentially the question is answerable with sources and facts. I think this question is certainly like [No more updates for Google Chrome 32-bit](https://askubuntu.com/q/724093), which is a perfectly on-topic subject. The question, I think, fits in `software-installation` category. Feel free to share your thoughts :).
Kulfy avatar
mz flag
@BruceBecker Just like you/AWS is sticking to an LTS release of Ubuntu, consider sticking to a Java LTS release. For completeness, the product, on which my team works, still uses Java 8 and we're not considering migration until OpenJDK 8 is supported, since migration is costly.
Kulfy avatar
mz flag
@Nmath Generally speaking, as a dev, users and other devs are informed well in advance when and why a particular feature/library/version is going to be deprecated to ensure that the other devs can remove/migrate their dependencies before "X" is deprecated. And it might be easy to overlook/miss these things. For example, in case of Python 2, Adobe Flash, and Java (where the lifecycle of major releases are pre-defined).
Nmath avatar
ng flag
Good points. I have retracted the close vote
Score:2
in flag

The link you posted explains the reason:

with a release version of openjdk-16 in 20.04 LTS, we don't want to support -13 and -14 anymore. Please remove these packages from the focal-updates pocket.

— Matthias Klose

With OpenJDK 16 being released, the maintenance team did not want to support OpenJDK versions 13, 14, 15, and 16. It’s just too much work when back-porting security fixes. If you’ve ever looked at the OpenJDK source, you would see why. So, with this in mind, it’s perfectly understandable why the people who ensure OpenJDK is up-to-date for Ubuntu want to focus on the more recent libraries … particularly given the resource constraints.

More than this, OpenJDK 13 and 14 are out of support. OpenJDK 13 went EOL in March 2020 and OpenJDK 14 joined the EOL club in September 2020. If the provider won’t support it, why should Canonical?

The six month release schedule that seems to be in effect is going to bite a lot of organizations (including mine), but the lack of support isn’t the fault of the Ubuntu team

Kulfy avatar
mz flag
Also, Java 13 and 14 were non-LTS releases. Currently Java 11 is the latest LTS release while Java 17 which is an LTS release, will be out next month. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history.
in flag
Cool. Thanks for the info
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