LTS for public releases

[Andrew Hughes]

On 7 November 2017 at 18:37, Kyle Moore <moorek at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone.
>
> I was following the thread "Impact of six month releases" and was left
> scratching my head after something pointed out by Kim Jensen's post.
> Specifically, the Java SE Support Roadmap page:
> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html
>
> The releases under "Java SE Public Updates" don't explicitly mention
> any LTS releases, though these are clearly called out in the support
> roadmap on the second table.
>
> Call me crazy, but is the implication here that releases of Java SE
> will not be publicly supported longer than six months? In the
> open-source community, I struggle with the issues mentioned earlier
> about backwards compatibility.
>
> If I read and understood the roadmap correctly, the potential for
> churn and compatibility issues created by the lack of a public LTS
> release is deeply concerning.
>
> --
> Kyle Moore
> http://gosu-lang.org/
> http://manifold.systems/

Well, that page is about Oracle's binaries, not OpenJDK in general.
It's important not to confuse the two.

It may well be that Oracle don't provide public binaries of LTS releases,
but there's nothing stopping anyone else from doing so and I would
expect that to continue as it does now in various distributions.

The Oracle move seems to be explained by this comment:

"instead of relying on a pre-installed standalone JRE, we will begin
encouraging application developers to deliver JREs with their applications"

As Oracle move from adding their own magic sauce to create their proprietary
binaries to basically just building OpenJDK ("the ultimate goal is to make
OpenJDK and Oracle JDK builds completely interchangeable" [0]), the need for
them to do so at all diminishes as others can equally fulfil the role
("This will make it easier to publish early-access builds for features in
development,  and eventually make it possible for the OpenJDK Community itself
to publish authoritative builds of the JDK")

[0] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2017-September/004281.html
-- 
Andrew :)

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

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