LTS for public releases

[Kim Jensen]

Hi Andrew,

> 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.
>
First, allow me to apologize for spamming this list so much. I'm deeply in awe over the work that you and others have done, and you have my utmost respect for the fantastic work you have done over the years.

Pre Java 9, things worked rather well with infrequent Java releases, and a transition period which was at least one year. Post Java 9, or more correctly with Java 18.9 LTS [2], we enter a new era - where there will be short term releases (6 month support) and LTS releases (5 year support). Plan is that every 3 years a new LTS release is made, giving customers 2 years to migrate. This is all good and well. Things can be planned and and customers & developers can continue to work.

As an added benefit, developers such as myself can more frequently test our software with the short term releases and verify that things are working. This will also help with the migrations from one LTS to another. Again, wonderful.

But, and here it comes... The announcement from Oracle stated that Java 8 is EOL in September 2018, Java 9 is EOL in March 2018. First LTS release is coming in September 2018, and as Short term releases only have support for 6 months, it means that there will be a period of 0 months to complete migrating from Java 8 to Java 18.9LTS. Migrating to Java 9 & Java 18.3 is not something our customers are willing to pay for, as it means 3 migrations rather than 1. And as we have seem, Java 8 to Java 9 is not a trivial upgrade. Loads of libraries are not working and I still have not seen what Java EE vendors will support or not.

So, simply put. Is it possible to get a word, that there will be a transition period from Java 8 to Java 18.9LTS, so it is possible to migrate without our customers loosing support ?

Thank you for listening to me. Unless asked, I will not comment again on this topic.

Regards,
Kim Jensen

[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html

Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.