Jenkins November 2023 Newsletter

[amurleopard]

Key Takeaways

• Basil Crow joins the Jenkins Governance Board.

• A Jenkins Contributor Summit will be held prior to FOSDEM.

• The Contributor Spotlight site is now live.

Contributed by: Mark Waite

Basil Crow joins the Jenkins governance board in December 2023. He’ll serve for a two-year term. Thanks to Basil for his willingness to serve. More details of the 2023 governance board and officer changes are available in a blog post by Alexander Brandes.

Jenkins 2.426.1 was released on November 15, 2023 with many improvements and additions. Darin Pope and Mark Waite reviewed the Jenkins 2.426.1 features in a 50 minute webinar. Key items include:

• Java 21 support

• Java 17 or Java 21 recommended

• Prototype.js JavaScript library removed

• Drop support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and its derivatives like CentOS 7

A Jenkins Contributor Summit will be held in Brussels, Belgium on Friday, February 2, 2024. We’ll gather for a day of presentations, planning, and working on the future of Jenkins. Immediately after the Contributor Summit, FOSDEM 2024 will be a two day conference focused on open source. Jean-Marc Meessen is gathering agenda topics and attendees on the community site.

Contributed by: Damien Duportal

Microsoft has donated $40,000 USD to the Continuous Delivery Foundation for use in member projects. The Jenkins project is pleased to be using those credits to reduce CDF expenses.

The AWS cost reduction project has a working prototype that is using Cloudflare R2 and the Jenkins mirror system to reduce bandwidth costs. We plan to complete the Jenkins Enhancement Proposal, a prototype temporary transition, and the production transition by January 31, 2024.

Contributed by: Mark Waite

Jenkins 2.426.1 provides a new “Appearance” page so that administrators have a single page to configure the Jenkins theme and other user interface details. Thanks to Tim Jacomb for the Appearance page.

Jenkins 2.426.1 also updates the Jenkins user experience with confirmation dialogs inside the pages instead of using the web browser’s confirmation dialog. Thanks to Markus Winter for the implementation of those dialogs and for the API that allows plugins to do the same.

Keyboard navigation has been improved in Jenkins 2.426.1 as well. Users can now access tab panes by keyboard navigation.

Contributed by: Bruno Verachten

• Java 21 support

  • The Jenkins enhancement proposal by Mark Waite is progressing nicely.

  • Progress of testing the top plugins with Java 21:

    • 108 of the top plugin repositories passing tests with Java 21.

    • 20 of the top plugin repositories not yet passing tests with Java 21.

  • The Infrastructure team finished the transition to official 21.0.1+12 Linux (17 on Windows).

  • All agents and controllers now supply a JDK21 or JDK21 preview Docker image.

• Java 17 is now the default Java version used in the Docker images, even for the LTS and Windows:

  • If you don’t use a tag specifying the JDK version like 2.429-jdk11, but shorter tags like 2.429, you will end up with an image using JDK17 and not JDK11 anymore.

• OS support:

  • CentOS 7 container images have been removed, starting from the 2.432 release.

• ARM64:

  • More services in the infrastructure have migrated to a new ARM64 nodepool.

Contributed by: Kevin Martens

The Contributor Spotlight is a new location where we will be highlighting the top contributors to Jenkins. We have been gathering and measuring data to determine who would be part of this group, and then reached out to everyone to collaborate and capture their stories. Thanks to all of the contributors who have collaborated with us on this project thus far, and all those who we will be working with going forward as well. We’ll be publishing new Contributor Spotlights every two weeks, to provide space for the current spotlight to shine and leave room for other announcements or news. Thanks to Alyssa Tong, Bruno Verachten, Jean-Marc-Meessen, Kris Stern, Hervé Le Meur and Cristina Pizzagalli for their work in gathering the data, designing the site, getting the site into production, and offering guidance along every step of the way.

November had four blog posts, including the Jenkins Contributor summit at FOSDEM announcement, the 2+2+2 Jenkins Java support plan, and the announcement of the Contributor Spotlight site.

https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2023/12/15/jenkins-november-newsletter/