Impact of six month releases (original) (raw)

Stephen Colebourne scolebourne at joda.org
Fri Nov 3 14:41:00 UTC 2017

On 3 November 2017 at 09:14, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:

I think this is throwing the baby (Java's long standing backwards compatibility) out with the bathwater (frequent releases), but I'm happy to hear other opinions. I don't believe that such worries are necessarily justified. We need to be able to roll back mistakes. The Java tradition that nothing ever gets removed, no matter how much mistaken, holds back innovation. It does this because of a justified fear that if we make a mistake, we're stuck with it, so we have to be ultra-cautious.

I think its more than that. Java's success is built on the broader ecosystem. The JDK itself is an enabler for that. Open source projects have to be able to produce jar files that work on multiple releases of the JDK. Things that prevent that are a big issue.

In practical terms I'd argue that:

  1. LTS releases define the removal cycle. Code added in a non-LTS release (n) can be deprecated in the next non-LTS release (n+1) and removed in the release after that (n+2). This works because the code was never in an LTS release. However, code that was in the last LTS release cannot be removed until the release after the next LTS.

eg. code present in 8 cannot be removed until 12 (as 11 is the first LTS where the deprecation is visible) eg. code added in 12 can be deprecated in 13 and removed in 14 as 12 and 13 are non-LTS

  1. There should be more than 2 security updates for each release. Without an overlap period, developers are forced to upgrade to the next release immediately it is GA. This does not reflect real-world software development practice. If the non-LTS releases are to be used in production they will need a bare minimum of 4 security updates (one year) to create a time window overlap with the next release.

  2. The javac --release flag should work for at least the last three LTS releases. A time-window of 10 years would also be about right. (Its a really convenient feature, and if possible I'd prefer it to never lose support for older versions).

Stephen

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