Accelerating the JDK release cadence

[Hohensee, Paul]

We at Amazon are interested in whether or not there will be longer term support CPUs for both 6-month (hereinafter termed ‘feature’) and LTS releases, primarily to support transitions from one release to the next. The current proposal implies a transition period of three months (the overlap between the lifetimes of a release and the last CPU for the previous release). We’re used to thinking in terms of a year’s worth of overlap, which would mean five CPUs for feature and fifteen for LTS releases rather than respectively two and eleven.

Questions:

1. How long will the CPU cycles be for both feature and LTS releases?
2. Will Oracle push the source for all CPUs to OpenJDK upon release?
3. Would the community (perhaps the Adoption project) be able/allowed to produce additional ‘sanctioned’ CPUs via backports from LTS and later feature release CPUs? 

Note that our understanding is that JDKs 9 and 18.3 are both feature releases, thus the LTS release previous to JDK 18.9 is JDK 8. If there were a year’s worth of CPU overlap between LTS releases, that would mean support for JDK 8 would end in September 2019.

A three-month transition time will make it difficult to adopt the feature release train in production. That would mean no production use or adoption of both JDKs 9 and 18.3.

Thanks,

Paul

On 9/24/17, 12:06 AM, "discuss on behalf of Andrew Haley" <discuss-bounces at openjdk.java.net on behalf of aph at redhat.com> wrote:

    On 22/09/17 17:02, Volker Simonis wrote:
    > On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 5:49 PM, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:
    >> On 22/09/17 15:34, Volker Simonis wrote:
    >>> Hi Mark,
    >>>
    >>> can you please detail what the statements from your blog regarding the
    >>> LTS releases means for the OpenJDK:
    >>>
    >>> "Every three years, start­ing in Sep­tem­ber of 2018, the fea­ture
    >>> re­lease will be a long-term sup­port re­lease. Up­dates for these
    >>> re­leases will be avail­able for at least three years and quite
    >>> pos­si­bly longer, de­pend­ing upon your ven­dor."
    >>>
    >>> Does this mean that Oracle will provide updates for the LTS versions
    >>> in the OpenJDK for at least three years? According to the "Oracle Java
    >>> SE Support Roadmap" [1] Oracle plans to offer much longer support time
    >>> frames for LTS releases. How is this going to work. Will Oracle step
    >>> back as lead of the corresponding LTS update projects after three
    >>> years (much as this was done for jdk7u for example) and leave the
    >>> project up to the community while doing its own LTS support from
    >>> private repos?
    >>
    >> That is pretty how it works now.
    > 
    > Yes, but I think jdk7 was supported nearly 5 years by Oracle while
    > 18.9 maybe only three years?
    
    August 2011 was the jdk7 GA, and Oracle EOL'd it April 2015.  Three years,
    eight months.
    
    >> While it'll be a PITA to handle
    >> divergent repos, we do know how to do it.
    > 
    > Especially because there will be new releases every six month so it
    > will potentially become harder to identify and downport security and
    > bug fixes from an increasing number of new release branches.
    
    I don't think that the porting will be especially onerous.  The six-
    monthly releases won't live for very long and won't differ from each
    other very much, so backports will hopefully be a NOP.
    
    I can't immediately see any motivation for anyone to want to do
    long-term support on a six-monthly release, but if they really want to
    that's up to them.  Fedora EOL happens one month after the GA of the
    next-but-one release, and I'd expect Java to be the same.
    
    -- 
    Andrew Haley
    Java Platform Lead Engineer
    Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
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