Hi Daniel,
Thanks for your inputs !
# I'd like to also thank you for your help for reviewing patches.
I have now clear view about the current status. Proposing updates to align
the library with recent best practise in java is the area we can definitely
help.
I'll discuss further details with my team mates based on these inputs and
will start proposing PRs soon, hopefully.
On 3/17/26 7:46 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé via Devel wrote:
On Sun, Mar 15, 2026 at 08:13:51PM +0900, Takashi Kajinami wrote:
Hi,
I've been working in a downstream project using libvirt-java to
manage resources in libvirt from our application written in Java.
The library has been working well so far, but I'm interested in
contributing further improvements of the library, such as;
- Replace finalize by more modern mechanisms such as (Auto)Closeable
(finalize is deprecated in recent OpenJDK versions)
- Complete migration to maven (to get rid of maven-ant-tasks which
was already retired)
However some of the planned contributions (especially the ones listed above)
have relatively large impact and I'd like to ask a few questions so that
so that we can drive the effort more smoothly.
1. Do you think that these are good/reasonable improvements ?
The challenge we have with libvirt-java is that none of the active
libvirt core maintainers have much expertise in Java. If you're
actively building Java apps using libvirt-java, then you're better
placed to suggest improvements.
We can advise on libvirt related integration matters, but for Java
"best practice" we'll defer to those with more knowledge.
2. May I request a new release ?
The last release (0.5.3) was released 4 years ago and several changes
such as new features have been merged since then. Creating a release
allows us to mave backword incompatible changes with less user impact.
Looks like I was responsible for that last release, so I'll see about
creating a new one.
3. Can we bump minimum JDK version ?
Current minimum JSK version supported by the library is 1.8.0 but this
is quite old ELS. I wonder if we can bump it to a newer version such as
OpenJDK 17 or even 21. This is required to replace "finalize".
Is there requirement about the platform the library should support ?
Libvirt's general policy has been to target the 2 most recent major
releases of common OS distros:
https://libvirt.org/platforms.html
In the absence of an explicit different policy for libvirt-java, we
can use the common policy as a guide.
JDK 1.8.0 is so ancient we can definitely modernize quite a long
way forward.
The older supported platforms are Ubuntu 22.04 / RHEL-9, but AFAICT
both of them include OpenJDK 21 support. So that sounds viable as
an upgrade.
IIUC the default OpenJDK version in these operating system versions are
bit older (11 in Ubuntu 22.04 and 17 in RHEL9/CentOS Stream 9), but
newer LTS versions (21 or even 25) are also packages. I guess we can set
our first target to 11, but will check if we can/should bump it further.
With regards,
Daniel
Thank you,
Takashi Kajinami
