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Today, my CI/CD pipelines died because we maintain several applicatiins which depend on Java 14. Looking at the logs, I saw that their dependencies could not be fulfilled, since they depend on java 14.

Indeed, it seems to have recently been removed from the (focal) repos. The only thing I can find is:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openjdk-14/+bug/1934892

I would love to know why it has been removed and if there is a PPA I can use for Java14. Thanks

Bruce Becker
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    Wrong place to ask no one here works for the company. – David Aug 27 '21 at 15:14
  • I think this is quite a narrow interpretation. – Bruce Becker Aug 27 '21 at 15:30
  • @Nmath I don't agree that the question is off-topic. Essentially the question is answerable with sources and facts. I think this question is certainly like No more updates for Google Chrome 32-bit, which is a perfectly on-topic subject. The question, I think, fits in software-installation category. Feel free to share your thoughts :). – Kulfy Aug 27 '21 at 15:36
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    @BruceBecker Just like you/AWS is sticking to an LTS release of Ubuntu, consider sticking to a Java LTS release. For completeness, the product, on which my team works, still uses Java 8 and we're not considering migration until OpenJDK 8 is supported, since migration is costly. – Kulfy Aug 27 '21 at 15:39
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    @Nmath Generally speaking, as a dev, users and other devs are informed well in advance when and why a particular feature/library/version is going to be deprecated to ensure that the other devs can remove/migrate their dependencies before "X" is deprecated. And it might be easy to overlook/miss these things. For example, in case of Python 2, Adobe Flash, and Java (where the lifecycle of major releases are pre-defined). – Kulfy Aug 27 '21 at 15:51
  • Good points. I have retracted the close vote – Nmath Aug 27 '21 at 16:43

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The link you posted explains the reason:

with a release version of openjdk-16 in 20.04 LTS, we don't want to support -13 and -14 anymore. Please remove these packages from the focal-updates pocket.

— Matthias Klose

With OpenJDK 16 being released, the maintenance team did not want to support OpenJDK versions 13, 14, 15, and 16. It’s just too much work when back-porting security fixes. If you’ve ever looked at the OpenJDK source, you would see why. So, with this in mind, it’s perfectly understandable why the people who ensure OpenJDK is up-to-date for Ubuntu want to focus on the more recent libraries … particularly given the resource constraints.

More than this, OpenJDK 13 and 14 are out of support. OpenJDK 13 went EOL in March 2020 and OpenJDK 14 joined the EOL club in September 2020. If the provider won’t support it, why should Canonical?

The six month release schedule that seems to be in effect is going to bite a lot of organizations (including mine), but the lack of support isn’t the fault of the Ubuntu team

matigo
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    Also, Java 13 and 14 were non-LTS releases. Currently Java 11 is the latest LTS release while Java 17 which is an LTS release, will be out next month. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history. – Kulfy Aug 27 '21 at 15:29
  • Cool. Thanks for the info – matigo Aug 27 '21 at 15:31