This topic provides details of the various forks that the Jenkins CI project maintains of other upstream projects.

Already in Debian/Ubuntu

hudson-dom4j

Summary

Comments

Jenkins fork appears to be due to upstream inactivity; alpha candidates of dom4j 2.0 where post in 2010 but not muck activity.

Fork adds support for dealing with short close tags and is used by Jenkins and Stapler. This will change the behaviour of this library when dealing with <P/> tags.

Number of patches: ~4 (one forwarded)

dom4j-patches.tar.gz

hudson-commons-jexl

Summary

Comments

Jenkins fork maintains a large number bug fixes and changes to the API; specifically exception handling. Some of these changes may have been incorporated into commons-jexl 2.0.1 but its hard to tell.

Not comfortable applying this patchset; seems large -- james-page 2011-06-13 15:10:31

jexl-patches.tar.gz

hudson-json

Summary

Comments

Quite a few fixes and improvements (including API changes) in the Jenkins fork which does lag behind the main usptream release in terms of major version numbers. Applying the patchset to existing libjson-java not recommended for this reason.

hudson-xstream

Summary

Comments

Lots of fixes and changes to resolve issues that the Jenkins team had encountered; upstream project inactive since 2008 (no releases). Updates remove clean support for Java 1.3.

I'm really uncomfortable about patching this into the libxstream-java already in the distro; it's a significant patchset and has the potential to regress other packages which use this library. -- james-page 2011-06-13 13:17:19

jenkins-xstream.patch

jenkins-trilead-ssh2

Summary

Comments

Trilead SSH2 upstream is non-existent; the project was shelved by its original owners; The jenkins fork adds a number of convience methods to the existing project and fixes up the interrupt exception handling in the codebase. This might make a good patchset for the existing library in Debian although it does change the API (so might not) with the introduction of better interrupt comms handling.

JSch might make a good alternative upstream but this would be a significant change.

Not yet packaged for Debian or Ubuntu

jenkins-commons-jelly

Summary

Comments

Apache Jelly has not released since 2005; Jenkins Jelly have been actively developed since then including performance improvements and other enhancements. The codebases have diverged quite alot over that time.

My gut feel on this one is to avoid packaging Apache Jelly (inactive upstream) and standardize on Jenkins Jelly (at least for jenkins); all of the required java artifacts can be generated from the Jenkins github hosted fork; Jenkins will be responsive to bugs as its a key part of the Jenkins toolset.

I've suggested this to Jenkins upstream; I can repack their current release in order to produce the required packaging but it is a bit of a hack.

jenkins-winstone

Summary

Comments

Winstone has been inactive upstream for a number of year; Jenkins have been actively maintaining and enhancing their fork.

That said, there is a 1.0 release of Winstone hosted on googlecode.com; it does not include many of the Jenkins enhancements (although it might be a good target for them longer term).

Not required

jenkins-htmlunit

Summary

Comments

Htmlunit is not yet packaged in Debian; there is an ITP and it does appear to be active (need to contain owner). Quite a bit of bug-fixing and improvement in the Jenkins fork.

However this package is only needed for testing in stapler (not yet enabled in Jenkins due to other complex missing dependencies). May be able to take out of the dependency chain.

jenkins-htmlunit-core-js

Summary

Comments

Most changes seem to be around improving exception handling and dealing with minor issues that impact jenkins. The patches associated with these fixes could potentially be applied to the version already in archive (2.8).

Number of patches: ~5

jenkins-htmlunit-core-js-patches.tar.gz