Backporting JDK-8210483 to Java 11

[Vitaly Davidovich]

On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 2:30 PM Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com> wrote:

> > May I ask why there's no plan to backport this to 11? We're seeing the
> same javac failure on our code, and simply moving to java 12 is a
> non-starter given it's a non-LTS release.  Is there something fundamentally
> difficult about backporting this fix to 11?
>
> You seem to implicitly assume that difficulty is the only criteria for
> back porting, but that is not, and has never been, the case.  With the
> advent of the rapid release cadence, where the next version is much closer
> in time, the bar for back porting has gotten significantly higher.  (Back
> porting any given issue might seem easy, but in the aggregate, back porting
> in general has enormous costs, as well as stability risks.  We would prefer
> to invest more of our efforts in feature development, and less in back
> ports.)
>
Yes, I'd assume the difficulty and perceived (in)stability of a backport
request would be weighed in the decision to backport or not.  But, this is
a bug fix - javac fails on fairly pedestrian code.

>
> You have choices; you can stay on the leading edge (in which case the fix
> is in 12), or you can stick with LTS.  Which features are back ported to an
> LTS distribution is the choice of your LTS provider.

Again, I'd imagine a javac bug of the sort here would be deemed critical to
backport to an LTS release.  But ok, if the answer is "refer to your LTS
provider", then so be it.

>   If you are getting your LTS releases from a commercial contract (such as
> Oracle’s Java SE subscription), you should ask for this through the support
> channel you are paying for — that’s what its there for.  If you are relying
> on LTS from OpenJDK, this is decided by whomever is leading the 11-updates
> project.  Currently this has not been handed over from Oracle to someone
> else, but that is likely to happen soon, in which case the updates list
> would be the place for this request (or to volunteer to do the back port!)
>
>
>
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