How to bootstrap OpenJDK / Maintain for newer alpine releases

Hi,

as it becomes more and more work to maintain the OpenJDK aports, I'd like to discuss some ideas and find a solution.

The main issue is, that each java version needs the previous (or the same) version to compile. The older versions are no longer maintained by oracle and I'm glad that they still compile on newer musl + gcc versions, but I suspsect them to break anytime soon.

Furthermore, each new alpine release results in a significant waste of buildtime as all versions neeed to be built but actually never be used. As there are always some strange new side-effects and build errors for the older java versions (which only gets built on new alpine releases) I think we need to take action soon.

My goal would be to just maintain the LTS versions + the newest releases since then. Furthermore, I'd like to crosscompile them on the other arches (especially on ppc64le, which is disabled since openjdk16 due to a strange build / runtime error) when needed.

• Any objections about my idea?
• How could this be done?
• Maybe we could bootstrap a new alpine release from the builds of the previous alpine release?

Thanks, Simon