Accelerating the JDK release cadence

[Andrew Haley]

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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