Impact of six month releases

[David Holmes]

Hi Goetz,

On 3/11/2017 8:23 PM, Lindenmaier, Goetz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I share the concerns mentioned in this thread.
> I just picked up work on our internal "next Java release after 8"
> project, which now has been relabeled from '9' to '11',
> and has been delayed the third time now.
> 
> The first change I looked at was " 8173421: Obsolete and expired
> flags for JDK 10 need to be removed and related tests updated".
> 
> I think this change needs to be redone:  First it needs to
> be reverted, then one needs to replace '9' by '11' and '10'
> by '17'.  Thus, the flags can be removed in jdk17 only,
> which is in 2021.
> 
> I appreciate that Java moves forward faster, as adding
> JEPs as "286: Local-Variable Type Inference" need not
> be delayed as long as it would have been in the old
> release rhythm.
> But deprecating stuff can only be done in the LTE releases,
> as most users will only see these.

8173421 is NOT deprecating stuff, it is removing flags that are as-of 
JDK 9 (if not earlier) completely unused - that is what "obsolete" means.

David
-----

> We are happy that one of our larger products will go to 8
> next year, finally!  For another product the installed base currently
> is 6: 5%, 7: 65%, 8: 30% ... Other teams that had planned to go to 9
> now will wait until 11. We, the JVM team, would like to see
> faster adoption of new Java version, as we don't like to keep
> supporting the old releases. But now the next LTE will be delayed
> another year. And adoption of JDK11 by these products
> will be even harder if there are lots of sudden incompatible
> changes ... and here sudden means from one LTE to another,
> no matter how much time there is between LTEs.
> 
> Best regards,
>    Goetz.
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: jdk-dev [mailto:jdk-dev-bounces at openjdk.java.net] On Behalf Of
>> Ryan Schmitt
>> Sent: Freitag, 3. November 2017 01:21
>> To: Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org>
>> Cc: jdk-dev at openjdk.java.net
>> Subject: Re: Impact of six month releases
>>
>> 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?
>> Three years or six months? Will we continue to have a new
>> bytecode version with every release, or will the classfile
>> format only be incremented as needed?