Proposed implementation of JEP 182 in JDK 11: drop javac support for -source/-target/--release 6 (original) (raw)

joe darcy joe.darcy at oracle.com
Fri May 11 05:21:22 UTC 2018

Hi Fridrich,

Thanks for the feedback.

FYI, in case you are not already aware of the option, I recommend using "javac --release N" for your builds directly or indirectly in preference to "javac -source N -target N". The major difference is that --release N restricts the API on the bootclasspath (or module equivalent) to the API from JDK N, reducing the need to use 3rd party tools like Animal Sniffer to monitor API usage.

The --release option to javac is available in JDK 9 and later.

HTH,

-Joe

On 5/10/2018 9:02 PM, Fridrich Strba wrote:

Not like I have anything to add to Stephen's opinion. Just give you a context about what we do in SUSE. For the while, our SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 will be released before OpenJDK 11 and we will have to make the OpenJDK 11 the default Java as a maintenance update. All our packages that don't use any 7+ features are built using source 6 and target 6. Changing that at this point of the release cycle would be quite error prone, not considering that we speak about hundreds of packages. So, I would be thankful to the Java luminaries not to do this change in 11.

Just my 2 cents Fridrich

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