LTS for public releases

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 8 November 2017 at 16:31, Andrew Hughes <gnu.andrew at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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.

I don't think this game of "well someone else might support it" is at
all helpful to the wider community.

Architects/senior devs need to know that the code they are writing now
can run on a supported platform for at least a few years after they
finish coding it. This has been one of the critical factors in Java's
success.

What is actually being promised is ridiculously woolly by comparison.
Oracle might provide 3 years of public updates on LTS for $free, or
they might not. Red Hat might provide some LTS's or they might not.
Red Hat LTS's might align with Oracle's LTS, or they might not. Some
other random group of "OpenJDK community" might turn up and do
something, or it might not.

No certainty. No ability to plan. Its a mess.

Stephen