[fedora-java] Heads-up: Upcoming netty major version update in Rawhide (Will Break Stuff)

[Marek Goldmann]

Hi Jon,

Thanks for the info!

There is another big player in the game: WildFly. It requires currently 
3.6.6.Final. I'm not sure how well it'll play with Netty 4 and I don't 
think that for Final they'll switch to version 4.

P.S. It's an actual bug that it does not have netty listed in Requires. 
Without this the standalone-full.xml configuration won't work. I created 
a bug:

	https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1026752

--Marek

On 24.10.2013 20:11, Jon VanAlten wrote:
> Hi Java folks,
>
> The current netty in Fedora is 3.6.3.  There are newer updates to 3.X series
> upstream but also for some time now 4.X series has been available.  In the
> spirit of keeping the most up to date version in our distro, I aim/plan to
> update this in rawhide in the coming weeks.  However, there have been some
> changes upstream that any maintainers of packages which depend on netty will
> need to be aware of.  Those packages are:
>
> async-http-client
> bookkeeper
> eclipse-m2e-core
> hadoop
> hornetq
> littleproxy
> resteasy
> thermostat
> zookeeper
>
> In addition, we currently have a compat netty31 package, which is used only
> by the eucalyptus package.  I'd also like to encourage the maintainer of
> eucalyptus to look into porting to the newer netty, so this longstanding
> compat package can be retired.  (Well, there are other packages that
> "repoquery --whatrequires netty31" returns, but inspection of .spec shows
> that they only Require: netty without a version; only eucalyptus has an
> explicit requirement for netty31.)
>
> So, what are the implications of this update?  Well, upstream netty has
> moved from being a jboss project to being independent at netty.io, and has
> changed their package namespace accordingly.  In addition, some key API
> classes have slightly changed names.  Finally, and I haven't looked deep at
> this part yet, but it seems there are some other incompatible API changes.
> Any package currently using netty will *at least* require a search-and-
> replace for package/class name changes, and may require more indepth fixes
> in order to work with the most recent upstream releases.
>
> The bulk of the changes came with the 4.0 release, and conveniently enough
> upstream made a single commit updating most of their example code at once[1]
> which is likely to be a good reference for anyone porting an application.
>
> I'll be starting on this work around mid-November.  My plan is to first
> create package of the newest netty release at the time but not push to
> rawhide just yet, rather make srpm available to interested maintainers via
> other means.  Then, as co-maintainer of thermostat, I will help to port that
> package to the new netty API.  I hope around this same time maintainers of
> other packages will do same.  To me, this will act as "sanity check" for the
> updated netty package, and if this check is successful, I'll then push the
> netty changes to rawhide.  If all goes well, this should be done by the end
> of November (modulo a week or so).
>
> Please, if you have any concerns with this plan, speak up!  Otherwise, wait
> for my email in a few weeks with .srpm to play with :)
>
> cheers,
> jon
>
> P.S. I *really* hope that at the end of all this we are not left with *two*
> compat packages for netty, ie I hope that either eucalyptus is able to port
> or that all of the others are able to port, or even better both of the
> above.
>
> [1] https://github.com/netty/netty/commit/8237afff64509520865c08bf4f5fd130e06aed92
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