Impact of six month releases (original) (raw)

Alan Bateman Alan.Bateman at oracle.com
Fri Nov 3 09:42:12 UTC 2017

On 03/11/2017 00:21, Ryan Schmitt wrote:

I have similar concerns along these lines. For example, JDK9 introduced the "one plus three back" policy for cross compilation, such that javac in JDK9 can now only target JDK6 and newer. Under the old release schedule, "one back plus three" could easily cover a decade's worth of JDKs, but now that window will shrink to approximately two years. There are similar questions around JDK deprecations: how long do my dependencies have to migrate to VarHandles and StackWalker? Moving to a feature release every 6 months will mean re-examining these policies, some will probably need to be changed to be based on time rather than "next release". The issue of APIs that are deprecated-for-removal is, at least in my view, the most important to decide on soon as it is impacts several areas with patches pending. Yes, policies for javac --release N, the version that jrtfs is compiled to is another, and there are several others.  Not clear if there is a "one-size-fits-all" policy, esp. when you get into the undocumented internal APIs and how aggressively we can remove/refactor internals when there are standard/supported APIs available.

-Alan.

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