Hi,

On Sun, 21 Jun 2026 at 22:43, Laszlo Kishalmi <[email protected]> wrote:
> I do not feel that the PMC should extend its reach and sign/test third
> party distributions. As on NB we could provide a list, on parties, those
> provides binary installers, though probably shall not favor any.

Thanks Laszlo for your input.  However, I'm unsure about this point.
Either this assumes a proposal to do something new, or it ignores what
we have already been doing for ~5 years?!  There has never been a
proposal for the PMC, as a whole, to extend its reach in this way.
Community installers are produced by individual PMC members.

On our download pages we list two sources of community installers -
https://netbeans.apache.org/front/main/download/nb30/#_installers_and_packages
 The Snap is produced, tested and signed off by you.  The others have
been produced, tested and signed off by me since 2021 (including when
distributed via FoAN last year).  They align with our release
processes - some of these used to be built in parallel on the same
hardware as the ASF installers.  We have never listed just any
third-party on our download pages - see the notice in the linked
section.

I realise that the Snap is a little different.  This was discussed
last year, eg. in
https://lists.apache.org/thread/ydl1nv75y2sbln86cnjssb007q2ynvo5  If
they move elsewhere, they could still be listed as long as they
continue to be produced by you or another PMC member.

A major point of the FoAN community installer transition was to have
them where other individual PMC members could be given access to build
and verify.  That is not really any different from opening up access
to other PMC members to build and verify the Snap.

> Looking at Codelerity, creating packages with Eclipse Temurin JDK.
> The site it seems be more complete.

The switch from Zulu to Temurin was because I originally built the
NB28 ones for my own use, and then decided to publish later because we
didn't have anything else to link to.  I've had a long standing issue
with the license text in Zulu.  Temurin also happens to be smaller.

The installer page has remained largely the same since Geertjan and I
first started producing these in 2021.  The original FoAN installer
site last year was essentially a carbon copy of this page.

> I recognize that this could lead to fragmentation of binaries. My view
> on that has shifted during the recent years. I think that's not
> necessary a bad thing.

Yes, we could stop all linking to installers on our download pages.
This is effectively the Option 1 in my original email, and I would
cease producing installers after this release.  Where we list possible
links for users, and how we verify the suitability of those we list,
is open to debate.  Note that the majority (60+%, 250,000+) of our
user base chooses installers over the zip.  This would be an even
bigger disruption for them than when we stopped ASF installers last
year.

It would also imply that FoAN ceases all installer distribution from
NB 31, at least until there's agreement from us on using our identity
for something else (see also private@)

> I could imagine a company or an university would
> create a binary without ergonomics, releasing a pure Java or PHP IDEs,
> solely PHP development  or education purposes.

Aside - yes, this is something I planned to experiment with once my
build repo isn't required for the standard installers.  I wrote image
filtering into NBPackage partly with this in mind.  Given we are
unlikely to have a reproducible build any time in the near future,
these could still then be built from the official binary zip with the
benefit of the payload remaining binary comparable with the ASF
release.

Best wishes,

Neil

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]

For further information about the NetBeans mailing lists, visit:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/Mailing+lists



Reply via email to