OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 2022/08/11

The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 11 August 2022 at 15:00 UTC with the following agenda:

  1. < please send agenda items >
  2. Any other business

Five Board members were present: Georges Saab, Annette Keenleyside, Andrew Haley, Volker Simonis, and Mark Reinhold.

The intent of these minutes is to capture the conversational flow of the Board's discussion and also to record decisions. If you are interested only in the latter then search for the word "AGREED" throughout the text.

0. Agenda?

Georges declared the meeting as quorate, thanked everyone for joining, and requested agenda items. He reminded the Board that in the absence of agenda items, the Bylaws require the Board to meet at least once per quarter.

Volker suggested discussion around the recent JSR 337 Maintenance Release 4 (Java SE 8). He brought up some concerns in April and later voted to approve the release as a member of the JCP Executive Committee in July. He was now worried about customer concerns around backward-incompatible changes and requested information about the reasoning for the provided solutions.

Mark reminded Volker that the Governing Board is not a technical decision-making body. The Board is intended to resolve disputes and ensure that the OpenJDK Community is functioning well. He said that this was a topic for the OpenJDK JDK 8 Update Releases mailing list, jdk8u-dev. Georges concurred, saying that if things had no resolution then the Board was the place to appeal, but it would not second-guess technical decisions. Andrew agreed but added that he thought the changes were a bit worrying. He thought that communication to Java users about these changes was important and observed that this was not an internal JDK discussion but something that included JCP approval. Annette hoped these kinds of changes would be rare as she does not want to break backward compatibility. Georges said that maintenance releases are rare, and maintenance releases with compatibility issues are even less frequent. Mark encouraged Volker to bring any new questions or concerns to jdk8u-dev.

Andrew started a discussion about the next time people might meet in person. JVMLS, FOSDEM, Devox, and JavaOne were all mentioned as possibilities. Georges suggested that people continue looking for opportunities.

After one final solicitation for agenda items and receiving none, Georges closed the meeting.

At this point, the Board adjourned.