I need to run JabRef on my debian machine. But suddenly, it stopped working! After a little bit of searching, I found out that openjfx was lately upgraded to version 11+26-5. Nice! So finally it can be used with Java 11!

But wait... JabRef can only run with Java 8. But uhmmm that means I need the openjfx for Java 8 as well?!

Using snapshot.debian.org confirmed that theory. Downgrading the packages of openjfx to 8u171-b11-2 made JabRef working again... Yeah, but then openjfx does not work with other versions than 11.

On the debian issue tracker you can find this bug: Debian bug #910407. There you can read:

openjdk-8 is still there because we haven't completed the transition to
Java 11 yet. It may remain in Buster but only as a build dependency,
there is no plan to support it at runtime. Java based applications in
Buster must run on Java 11 (it should soon become the default JRE).

For these reasons packaging openjfx-8 doesn't really make sense. That
would be a string preventing us from moving forward.

Uhmmmm, so that means Java 8 is basically out of order soon, but there are still very useful tools using it. Why is it so hard to create different versions of openjfx to work with each java version? What is even weirder about the openjfx package, is that it does not pin the versions of the dependand packages and also does not specify the required java version:

Package: openjfx
Version: 11+26-5
Priority: optional
Section: java
Maintainer: Debian Java Maintainers <pkg-java-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Installed-Size: 30,7 kB
Depends: libopenjfx-java
Recommends: openjfx-source
Homepage: https://openjfx.io
Download-Size: 8.848 B
APT-Sources: http://cdn.debian.net/debian testing/main amd64 Packages
Description: JavaFX/OpenJFX - Rich client application platform for Java
 JavaFX/OpenJFX is a set of graphics and media APIs that enables Java developers
 to design, create, test, debug, and deploy rich client applications that
 operate consistently across diverse platforms.

Package: openjfx
Version: 8u171-b11-2
Priority: optional
Section: java
Maintainer: Debian Java Maintainers <pkg-java-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Installed-Size: 77,8 kB
Depends: libopenjfx-java, openjdk-8-jre
Homepage: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/openjfx/
Download-Size: 35,8 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20180612T213951Z unstable/main amd64 Packages
Description: JavaFX/OpenJFX 8 - Rich client application platform for Java
 JavaFX/OpenJFX is a set of graphics and media APIs that enables Java developers
 to design, create, test, debug, and deploy rich client applications that
 operate consistently across diverse platforms.

From that alone, I thought that openjfx 11 would work with the old versions just fine. But no, it does not.

That means I need to run JabRef in a VM soon, in order to make it work... Nice!