Incubation Feature Clarifications (original) (raw)

Brian Goetz brian.goetz at oracle.com
Mon Feb 5 14:52:25 UTC 2018

Part of the goal of the Incubating JEP is to make the incubation-vs-permanent difference as small as possible.  For almost anything not explicitly spelled out in the JEP, the answer is usually "no different than any other feature."  In that light:

Hi, I am Manoj from the Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT) and from Eclipse JDT Dev, we have a couple of clarifications regarding the incubation features:

 Mandatory or Optional: We understand that when an incubation feature is included in a release, it should be of production quality. However, do we, as spec/compiler implementers have the freedom to omit an incubation feature? In Other words, would we be termed non-compliant if we do not implement a particular incubation feature?

This one is spelled out in the JEP, but the answer is: no different than any other feature.  It's part of the spec, so its part of what the ecosystem should support.  (This further underscores the fact that incubating features are not for experimental or risky features.)

 Timeline:  How much minimum time (in weeks/months) before the release can we expect a feature to be categorized as incubation? If it depends on the feature, what could be a ballpark estimate?

No different than any other feature.  For any feature, incubating or not, the key milestone is Propose To Target; at this point, a JEP owner should consider whether including such a feature at this point in the cycle is the best choice.  (Incubating or not, integrating a risky feature near the close of the development cycle is not a good idea; there's another train coming soon.)

JEPs that affect the platform specification are tagged as Scope: SE.  Language features are tracked in component specification:language; VM features in specification:vm.  It is easy to create queries that track JEPs by filtering on these fields; this dashboard, used by the SE 10 EG (https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=17511), is one such example -- you can customize as you like.  So it is easy to track the lifecycle of JEPs that will affect the language and which will ultimately need IDE support.

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