Cleaning up technical debt is a perennial topic among Jenkins core developers, and one of the most visible issues is the use of obsolete and/or forked third-party libraries. In a world where Dependabot is offering updates to libraries released just hours before, it is unpleasant to be working with dependencies that are many years old. Since large organizations in particular are unhappy to install software using obsolete or nonstandard versions, my employer (CloudBees) gave its blessing for me to spend some time cleaning up some of the worst offenders.

The toughest nut to crack was the Acegi Security library used for authentication, which has long since been replaced by Spring Security (and Jenkins was also bundling a long-outdated version of some Spring Framework dependencies). jep:227[] tracks the complicated task of updating to Spring Security without breaking the numerous plugins that interact with authentication, especially those offering a Security Realm.

Another longstanding problem was the XStream library which Jenkins uses to read and write XML configuration files. This had been forked long ago by what was then the Hudson project and a few fixes applied. Unfortunately, some of those fixes were rejected upstream as invalid (representing unsupported usage patterns), and the fork fell behind the upstream version. jep:228[] describes the impact of switching to the upstream library in a more standard usage mode, including fixes to a smaller number of plugins which would otherwise be incompatible.

Now that the Jenkins 2.266 weekly release includes both updates, it is important for both Jenkins administrators and plugin maintainers to check for actual or potential incompatibilities. There are two tables listing the impact of these changes on plugins:

If you use Jenkins then it is a good idea before upgrading to take a look at these tables to see if you are running any plugins considered incompatible. If so, try not to rely on that plugin, or find out if there is an active maintainer who could help. For entries marked unknown, it would be appreciated if you could do a sanity check after upgrading and offer a pull request to the table page (click Edit this file) with a more informative status.

If you find a regression in a plugin, please file a bug report in Jira and link to it from the table. Also please add a JEP-227 or JEP-228 label as appropriate, for ease of tracking:

If you maintain a Jenkins plugin then please check whether it is marked anything less than compatible. In some cases, there are already pull requests awaiting merge. In other cases, some minor aspects of the source code have been identified that could be edited to improve compatibility.

We expect to see a bit of disruption from these changes but hope that in the long run they will save time for core and plugin developers and lead to a more secure and stable tool. Please reach out on the developers’ list with any questions or suggestions.