Apache Commons Digester library removal (breaking changes!)

Baptiste Mathus June 4, 2021

Keeping up with our goal to clean up some of the technical debt inside Jenkins Core and reduce the maintenance overheads, we are happy to report we were able to remove a long-deprecated Apache Commons Digester library.

Jenkins Core does not depend anymore on Apache Commons Digester v.2.1, a version that has been released in 2010.

Some plugins will require update to operate properly after the Jenkins core upgrade. See JEP-231 for the full list of the affected plugins. Below there is the list of plugins that did not have their fix released at the time of writing. They will start to break with the weekly on the 7th of June, expected to be the 2.297.

In addition to these still-served plugins, a few others will break. Note however that these were already suspended ^[1] for various reasons, so we do recommend to move away from using them or step up as maintainers. The IDs for these plugins are: tfs, svn-release-mgr, cpptest, cflint, script-scm, rtc.

It is always a good idea to update all your plugins before upgrading Jenkins core.

Please reach out on the developers’ list with any questions or suggestions.

Getting fixes in the affected plugins

For all affected plugins we have submitted pull requests with compatibility patches. These plugins seem to have no active maintainer, and hence we cannot commit on delivering those fixes. In mean time you can build a custom patch locally to resolve the issue on your instances. If you use any of those plugins, consider stepping up and adopting them so that the fixes could be released. We will appreciate any contributions!

Resources

PR-5320: removing commons-digester:2.1. This also contains a complete list of impacted plugins and their PRs and statuses.
JEP-231: describing this change.

1. this means these plugins are not served anymore by the Jenkins Project’s hosting service. Even if they were released, the releases would not show up until additional issues are fixed.

About the author

Baptiste Mathus

Baptiste has been using and contributing to Jenkins since it was called differently, and is a huge proponent of the Agile, Devops & Continuous Delivery movements. He loves to discuss not only the technical aspects, but also the even more essential cultural aspects of this all, working together to improve the value provided to customers in a great inclusive and blameless environment.