Will the XJetty package be continued in the long run?

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1

Hi Devs,

After reading the changelog of 17.0 RC1 a question (or multiple related ones) about XJetty vs Tomcat pops into my head.

As far as I remember and understand the introduction of an .deb package with an modified Jetty (XJetty) was mainly, because the old tomcat9 was not available in current Debian 12.X. Back then it was uncertain how long this additonal work of the Jetty would be required. It was clear that it was the new go-to solution for current debian servers at least until an solution with an current tomcat would be available.
We switched our XWiki Server to Debian 12 with the xjetty .deb package quite long ago and are very happy with it, thank you very much for that additional work and effort!!

Now with the 17.X jakarta based branch as you can again use tomcat in a current release of debian again, I would be very interested if you plan on switching from XJetty back to tomcat as the main reccomended / documented “way”?
Also im very interested in some background: What is easier for you to maintain? What do you think is technical beneficial? Will both coexist and be maintained the same or will the modified jetty be dropped soner or later?

I personally have no special feeling for either tomcat or XJetty, I’m way to uninformed in that topic, the technical background and what special benefits they might have over the other. In the past both seemed to work good as far as I could tell.

Now that very much of the documentation, many recent forum threads and probably many new servers are based on XJetty, I can only think that it would be nice if XJetty would be continued, but I completely understand that this is probably very much dependent of the required maintenance effort of the solutions.

I would really love to hear your thoughts on that topic!

Best regards
Tom

2

I guess that’s the best answer I can give for now.

As the main maintainer of the Debian packages right now, I don’t feel the maintenance of the xjetty package is much of a burden, so I don’t think it will be dropped anytime soon. Most of the effort put on the XJetty packaging is actually reused for the all-in-one jetty+hsqldb demo packaging, which is used a lot for testing and quick validation. I suspect it will be easier to maintain than the Tomcat one because it’s less dependent on changes/versions we don’t control, and it even provides a slightly better “just work” experience currently. The main part is maintaining the init system, but if we don’t get a new initd -> systemd level switch in the Debian-like world, it should not be too much work either.

In any case, if we ever drop it, it will be in an x.0.0 version, so you are safe for 17.x at the very least.

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Thank you very much for the clarification, and of course for your work!