Accelerating the JDK release cadence

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

2017/9/6 9:58:15 -0700, Andrew Hughes <gnu.andrew at redhat.com>:
> On 6 September 2017 at 16:39, Mario Torre <neugens at redhat.com> wrote:
>> ...
>> 
>> I'm curious about the model and how it will practically work out, i.e
>> "a new feature release every six months, update releases every
>> quarter, and a long-term support release every three years". Does it
>> means that the long-term support is the equivalent of today
>> jdk7jdk8/jdk9 etc.. while the other will be basically just development
>> version in between with various degree of stability? Or is it the goal
>> that every version will be production ready?
> 
> My interpretation of this was that it would be something like the Firefox
> model. As Mark's blog states in more detail, the idea is for all releases
> to be production ready and, indeed, for the development mainline to be
> more stable in general, so big features would only go in when they
> are ready to go out (implying they need to be tested heavily elsewhere)

Exactly.

> So I see it more as distros like Fedora would pick up every feature
> release, while something like RHEL would use the long-term
> support release. I presume update releases would be made available
> for both; basically the equivalent of the current security releases
> on the same cycle. So, October 2018 & January 2019 would see
> just the security update for the long-term support release, 18.9, but
> April 2019 would see security updates for both 18.9 and 19.3, the next
> feature release after the long-term release (assuming updates stick
> to Oracle's product-wide quarterly update cycle).

That's the plan.

- Mark