Jenkins LTS will drop support for Java 11 in October

[richardlau]

https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2024/06/11/require-java-17/

The first LTS release to require Java 17 or newer will ship at the end of October 2024.

After #3030 most of our agents are being run with Java 17.

Scanning through https://ci.nodejs.org/computer/ it looks like Java 11 is still being used on:

• CentOS 7
• Debian 10
• FreeBSD 12
• SmartOS
• IBM i

We can drop the CentOS 7 machine.

@abmusse Is Java 17 available on IBM i?

[abmusse]

@richardlau

Yes, Java 17 is available but it looks like its not packaged as an RPM.
I'm investigating what would be required to upgrade to Java 17.

[richardlau]

@nodejs/build-infra Do we want to keep Debian 10 around in the CI or just remove? It's End-of-Life as of June 2024.

(If we want to keep it, there are options for Java 17 -- both Oracle and Adoptium offer Java 17 that should work on Debian 10 AFAICT.)

[sxa]

Debian 10 has the same glibc level as RHEL8 so it's technically feasible to keep that going as a functional system ....
However since it's out of support I'm not sure I'd want to keep it on the network, so perhaps we should just upgrade it to a later release.

[richardlau]

Another reason to remove Debian 10 is that npm 10.8.3 contains an update to node-gyp that now requires Python 3.8. The packaged version of Python on Debian 10 is 3.7.3. While it might be possible to install newer Python 3 on the machine by other means, that in combination with the Java 11 issue will add more maintenance overhead to keeping this End-of-Life platform active in the CI.

Removal of Debian 10 will still leave Debian 11 and 12 in the CI, so we'll still have coverage on Debian there.