Impact of six month releases

[Alan Bateman]

On 03/11/2017 00:21, Ryan Schmitt wrote:
> I have similar concerns along these lines. For example, JDK9
> introduced the "one plus three back" policy for cross
> compilation, such that javac in JDK9 can now only target JDK6
> and newer. Under the old release schedule, "one back plus
> three" could easily cover a decade's worth of JDKs, but now
> that window will shrink to approximately two years. There are
> similar questions around JDK deprecations: how long do my
> dependencies have to migrate to VarHandles and StackWalker?
Moving to a feature release every 6 months will mean re-examining these 
policies, some will probably need to be changed to be based on time 
rather than "next release". The issue of APIs that are 
deprecated-for-removal is, at least in my view, the most important to 
decide on soon as it is impacts several areas with patches pending. Yes, 
policies for `javac --release N`, the version that jrtfs is compiled to 
is another, and there are several others.  Not clear if there is a 
"one-size-fits-all" policy, esp. when you get into the undocumented 
internal APIs and how aggressively we can remove/refactor internals when 
there are standard/supported APIs available.

-Alan.