Check for Java 21 for OH5?

[mstormi]

Some maintainer asked if we could check for Java 21 to exist when switching to or installing snapshots (OH5 now which requires Java 21)

not sure what / how much we would need to do here.

[ecdye]

We could probably just install the BelSoft 21 routine if needed.

[mstormi]

better to install OpenJDK 21, Belsoft was just for some special case not exactly sure but was'nt it 32bit?
read somewhere that Java 21 is backwards compatible such that if someone changes back to OH4 release they can keep java.

[ecdye]

I think BellSoft was for arm32 primarily but appears to work elsewhere.

I haven't really looked into it at all, but I do know that on bookworm the JDK 21 hasn't been added to the APT repo.

[ecdye]

@mstormi I'm going to pick this up next. Hopefully I can get it done in the next few days. I'm thinking we go with our tested Adoptium's Eclipse Temurin packages. They are also what are recommended by the main distribution for OH 5 IIRC

[mstormi]

I guess there's no real recommendation for now in the sense that some Java dev compared and recommended it's just what they got it to work with.
I suggest we check out the testing and unstable Debian repositories first incl. 3rd party repo providers. Maybe there's some OpenJDK 21 package available.

[ecdye]

I guess there's no real recommendation for now in the sense that some Java dev compared and recommended it's just what they got it to work with. I suggest we check out the testing and unstable Debian repositories first incl. 3rd party repo providers. Maybe there's some OpenJDK 21 package available.

There may be some, but I think it is worth exploring the Adoptium Temurin builds. We've actually already been supporting them for years. We just originally implemented them under the name of AdoptOpenJDK but they had a couple of renames since then.

I'll try to add both options, I'm curious which is a smaller runtime and also if either has greater support.

Also aș a side note, as part of this I plan to get rid of all the legacy Zulu support, I'm done using them especially after all that I've had to do in the past to get support from them. We have much better alternatives from the Debian folks and Adoptium.