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

[Matt Spaulding]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 11:11 AM, Jon VanAlten <jvanalte at redhat.com> 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.
>

I'm currently working on making Eucalyptus 3.3.2 available in Fedora 18/19,
and this version still requires the netty31 compat package. Version 3.4.0
of Eucalyptus, which was just released, had its dependency on netty updated
to 3.6.6. It required a fair amount of internal changes to make that update
possible, so updating yet again to netty 4.0 may be difficult. I'll be
starting work on Eucalyptus 3.4.0 in rawhide soon and can try using your
srpm when available. So, netty 4.0 is a maybe and netty31 won't be needed
for Eucalyptus in rawhide.


>
> [1]
> https://github.com/netty/netty/commit/8237afff64509520865c08bf4f5fd130e06aed92
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