R.I.P. 1.7.x: Announcing a 3-release maintenance period

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

We now have four active branches (1.7, 1.8, 1.9 and 1.10).  I don't
plan to continue maintaining all four, so the oldest (1.7) will be
dropped, making 1.7.10 the last release in this series.  I think we
can all agree that 1.7 has had a good life, but is now rather dated
and users should be encouraged to move to a newer release.

>From my perspective, I'll be adopting this as a new policy of
maintaining only the three most recent releases and dropping the
oldest when a new major release occurs.  This is still much more than
we had in the early days of IcedTea, when there was only one major
release and no supported minor releases.  Given we will soon have a
2.x series to work with as well (when OpenJDK 7 is finally released)
we do need to start culling some old versions.

So please take this as early warning that I'll no longer be
maintaining 1.8.x when 1.11.0 is released.

IcedTea is of course a Free Software project so others are more than
welcome to take on the role of maintaining these older releases,
should they so wish.  Please contact the list if you intend to do so,
and arrangements can then be made with respect to security releases.

Thanks,
-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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