blog: early access builds for all releases

content/blog/early-access-builds-feb2024/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,128 @@
+---
+title: Tagged early access builds for all releases
+date: "2024-02-21T14:00:00+00:00"
+author: sxa
+description: Adoptium are now publishing early access "tagged" builds for all Temurin releases
+tags:
+  - temurin
+---
+
+[A few months ago](https://adoptium.net/blog/2023/08/early-access-builds)
+we switched from producing semi-nightly builds of the head of our
+repositories to building from upstream tags for JDK21+.  We have now
+switched all of the currently supported repositories over to the same
+mechanism so jdk8u, jdk11u, and jdk17u are also now building and publishing
+from the upstream early access tags.  This will also include our
+“evaluation” platforms - currently Windows on 64-bit Arm and Linux on
+riscv64.
+
+## How often do new tags come out?
+
+The tags are typically created upstream once a week so you should expect
+that our early access builds will be triggered and published on that
+cadence.  We are running our full set of tests on each build too, although
+unlike our formal GA releases we will not tie the publishing of these to the
+results of the test runs - early access builds should be considered untested
+and not for production use.  The early access builds will typically come out
+towards the end of each week and for those of you in the adoptium
+slack/matrix channels there are daily status posts regarding the health of
+these builds.
+
+By building and providing these early access builds from tags instead of the
+head of the default branch we can more easily work with the upstream openjdk
+project to identify the contents of a specific builds when providing bug
+reports and reproductions.
+
+## How do I get the early access builds?
+
+You can obtain the tagged early access builds from [the
+download page](https://adoptium.net/temurin/nightly/) or the API
+using a URL such as the following, changing the operating system and
+architecture for your needs.  Note that if you are accessing these URLs
+using curl you will need to add the -L option to dereference the API’s
+redirects:
+
+- https://api.adoptium.net/v3/binary/latest/21/ea/linux/aarch64/jdk/hotspot/normal/adoptium
+
+At the time of writing this will provide you with jdk-21.0.3+3.  If you want
+a previous build to compare with then you can specify a particular version
+directly when calling the API, for example this will retrieve jdk-21.0.3+2
+from the previous week:
+
+- https://api.adoptium.net/v3/binary/version/jdk-21.0.3+2-ea-beta/linux/aarch64/jdk/hotspot/normal/adoptium
+
+Also while it is not the recommended way to retrieve them you can also find
+the releases named with an ea-beta suffix directly on the GitHub releases
+pages such as
+
+- https://github.com/adoptium/temurin21-binaries/releases?q=ea-beta&expanded=true
+
+the release names in there correspond with the part of the API URL after
+“/version/” in the API example above.
+
+Please note that early access builds are not made available as rpm/deb or
+container images.
+
+## Can I tell what's changed in each tagged build from the previous one?
+
+Yes you can!  Since the tags are generally produced on a weekly cadence
+there typically aren't too many commits between the releases, so if you
+detect a problem there will only be a small number of commits that may have
+caused it.  A query such as this:
+
+- https://github.com/adoptium/jdk21u/compare/jdk-21.0.3+2_adopt...jdk-21.0.3+3_adopt
+
+will show the commits between 21.0.3+2 and 21.0.3+3.  Since our source is as
+clean as possible from upstream openjdk, the following URL using the
+upstream openjdk repository will typically give the same output:
+
+- https://github.com/openjdk/jdk21u/compare/jdk-21.0.3+2...jdk-21.0.3+3
+
+From the command-line if you have a clone of our repository you can use
+these comments to get the list of commits and or the full source code diff:
+
+```sh
+git log jdk-21.0.3+2_adopt..jdk-21.0.3+3_adopt
+git diff jdk-21.0.3+2_adopt..jdk-21.0.3+3_adopt
+```
+
+## Release Candidate builds
+
+Since we are now producing builds explicitly from the tags, this means that
+when a build is declared as a release candidate for an upcoming release, you
+can download a Temurin early access build corresponding to that version on
+each of our platforms.  At the time of writing jdk-22+36 has been declared
+release candidate 2 (jdk-22+35 was RC1) for the upcoming JDK22 release so
+using similar queries to those referenced earlier it can be downloaded from:
+
+- https://api.adoptium.net/v3/binary/version/jdk-22+36-ea-beta/linux/aarch64/jdk/hotspot/normal/adoptium
+
+## Why am I not seeing early access builds for the latest release?
+
+There is one caveat for producing early access builds using this procedure.
+The process relies on the party maintaining the upstream version to perform
+the tagging in public.  If those tags aren't visible in public, we have no
+way to build from an invisible tag.  This usually happens for the time
+period when new major JDK versions get released and subsequent quarterly
+security updates for those releases are being handled (usually by Oracle).
+For example between JDK `22` GA, `22.0.1` and `22.0.2` releases.  There are
+no public tags available for early access tags `jdk-22.0.1+1`,
+`jdk-22.0.1+2` and so on.  Should processes change some time in the future
+we'd of course provide early access builds using the same process as for
+other releases.
+
+In the case of no publicly visible tags, however, we will revert to building
+regularly from the head of the repository.  In these cases if you need to
+know what is in each version you can determine which git SHA we built from
+using corresponding SBoM artefact that can be downloaded from the API by
+replacing “/jdk/” with “/sbom/” in the above URL.  For example:
+
+- https://api.adoptium.net/v3/binary/version/jdk-22+36-ea-beta/linux/aarch64/sbom/hotspot/normal/eclipse?project=jdk
+
+If you are using a GNU grep then this will easily show the commit:
+
+- `curl -L https://api.adoptium.net/v3/binary/version/jdk-22+36-ea-beta/linux/aarch64/sbom/hotspot/normal/eclipse?project=jdk | grep -A1 "OpenJDK Source Commit"`
+
+For more information on the adoptium API see the swagger-ui docs linked at https://api.adoptium.net
+
+Please let us know if you find the early access builds useful.

content/blog/early-access-builds/index.md

@@ -6,6 +6,11 @@ description: Adoptium are publishing early access "tagged" builds instead of nig
 tags:
   - temurin
 ---
+
+NOTE: Much of the information in this blog has been superceded by
+https://adoptium.net/blog/2024/02/early-access-builds-feb2024 - please refer
+to that one instead
+
 In addition to the generally available release builds of all currently supported
 versions of openjdk (Currently 8, 11, 17 and 20) Temurin also publishes "nightly"
 development builds of all of those streams as well as the upcoming releases (JDK21/22