Eclipse Hudson 3.3.0 Release Review

Type
Release
State
Successful
End Date of the Review Period

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Release

3.3.0

Description

Hudson 3.3.0 will be a major release and will involve some library changes.  One significant change though for this release will be the adoption of Java 7 as the basline version for running Hudson as opposed to Java 6.  Hence we are flagging this as a Major Release.

It will still be possible to use Hudson to compile code with earlier Java versions, but the Hudson server must be running with Java 7

Bugs and Enhancements desired for this release should be tagged in the whiteboard with candidate-3.3.0 as the tag.

API Certification

The project leadership certifies that the APIs in this release are "Eclipse Quality".

Architectural Issues

This release is another important step forward for Hudson ensuring that we keep up to date with current infrastructures and supportable libraries. The move to Java 7 as a baseline opens further opportunities to modernize the Hudson codebase, as well as removing some of the support debt of running on an out of date Java base.

Security Issues

In this release we have carried out some pro-active upgrades to remove our dependencies on old versions of Apache Commons FileUpload and Xalan which could give rise to security issues in the futher. (Thanks to Manfred Moser for alerting us to these potential problems). 

We have also updated the version of jGit used by the GIT plugin (not core) to address CVE-2014-9390 in that library  

Non-Code Aspects

Outwardly the changes in this release wil have no effect on the day to day use of Hudson (apart from the change in installation requirements). Everything else is invisible and requires not doc changes. 

Usability Details

Unchanged from Hudson 3.2.0

End of Life

The ability to run Hudson on a Java 6 baseline is the core feature being EOLed in this release.  For users of the internal Jetty server the impact will be minimal, but for users who have deployed the Hudson application to a Java Enterprise Edition 5 Application server, such as WebLogic 10.3.5, an upgrade of the application server will be required to one that will support Java 7 use. Public updates to Java 6 ceased in 2013 so we feel that there has been sufficient time for Hudson users to move onto newer versions of the Java platform. 

Given that Java 7 has also ended it's public updates earlier this year (Ref: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html), we intend to move our baseline upwards onto Java 8 in the near term. So although Java 7 is now the base version you can run Hudson on, we recommend that you move directly to a Java 8 platform if you are able. 

Note that with this release we will also be removing all direct access to the historical (pre-Eclipse) Hudson archive. If you need access to a pre-Hudson 3.0 version please contact the Hudson team via the forum.

Communities

Hudson maintains a healthy community interaction.  The forum is active and we hold an open community phone call bi-weekly.