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
Mon May 14 23:33:18 UTC 2018

On 5/14/2018 8:05 AM, Fridrich Strba wrote:

Alan,

On 14/05/18 15:51, Alan Bateman wrote: Do the upstream projects have maintainers and are there bugs submitted to the issue trackers of the upstream projects? Just curious as it seems that many of the issues are you wrestling with won't be solved by extending the support for --release 6 to yet another release. Instead it seems, at least based on a quick browse of the bug report logs, that many of the issues relate to things were deprecated and eventually removed (javah, extensions mechanism, the legacy doclet API, ....) and it makes me wonder if some of these "packages" are actively maintained or not. This is not an objection in principle to dropping some compatibilities. This is just us begging you for mercy at this moment. If one of the first commits to the jdk tree after jdk10 branch-off was deprecating the --release 6 option, I would have enough time to switch all packages to --release 8 compatibility as to be on the safe side. At this moment, since at the day or SLE release, OpenJDK 10 will be active and OpenJDK 11 not even released, I will have to push OpenJDK 11 to SLE as a maintenance update. If suddenly hundreds of packages stop building because we specify 6 as compatibility, I will be in a deep s**t. So, I am begging you for mercy for this time. That is all I am asking for.

Note that as of JDK 9 javac prints out warnings message like

    warning: [options] source value 1.6 is obsolete and will be removed in a future release     warning: [options] target value 1.6 is obsolete and will be removed in a future release

upon use of 6/1.6 as an argument to -source/-target/--release. In other words, the 6/1.6 release value is already "deprecated", but still accepted.

After 6/1.6 is removed, 7/1.7 will be deprecated in turn.

Cheers,

-Joe

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