blog: early access builds for all releases

Signed-off-by: Stewart X Addison <[email protected]>

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

@@ -0,0 +1,102 @@
+---
+title: Early access builds for all releases
+date: "2024-02-21T14:00:00+00:00"
+author: sxa, andrew-m-leonard
+description: Adoptium are now publishing early access "tagged" builds for all Temurin releases
+tags:
+  - temurin
+---
+
+[https://adoptium.net/blog/2023/08/early-access-builds/](A few months ago)
+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 Arm and Linux on RISC-V.
+
+## 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.  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.
+
+## How do I get the early access builds
+
+You can download the tagged builds from the website or the API using a URL
+such as the following - change 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 them 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 preferred 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 these are generally produced on a weekly cadnece 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, this output will typically give the
+same output as this query against the upstream openjdk repository:
+
+https://github.com/adoptium/jdk21u/compare/jdk-21.0.3+2...jdk-21.0.3+3
+
+Please let us know if you find these regular early access builds useful.
+
+## 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 obtain a Temurin beta build of that version on each of our platforms. 
+At the time of writing jdk-22+36 has been declared release candidate 1 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 early access builds is that for the few months after
+a new major release comes out when it is typically managed by Oracle there
+are no regular tags produced so we cannot use the processes described in
+this article to build from tags.  In this case 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 github SHA we built
+from using corresponding SBoM 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/latest/17/ga/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