LTS for public releases

Andrew Haley aph at redhat.com
Thu Nov 9 16:34:37 UTC 2017


On 08/11/17 17:31, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> 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.

I'm finding it very hard to understand what you're complaining about.
Look at the history: JDK 6 support has been extended by the community,
led first by me and then by Andrew Byrgin at Azul.  This was long
beyond Oracle's EOL five years ago.  This shows that the OpenJDK
community has a solid track record of supporting old releases.  Why
would the LTS releases be any different?  As long as people need the
JDKs (and perhaps for longer!)  they are available.

-- 
Andrew Haley
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
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