Proposed implementation of JEP 182 in JDK 11: drop javac support for -source/-target/--release 6

[Alan Bateman]

On 11/05/2018 23:02, Emmanuel Bourg wrote:
> :
> We are facing the same issue in Debian/Ubuntu where we maintain ~1300
> Java based packages. We opted to patch Ant [1] and Maven [2]
> (plexus-compiler actually) to automatically bump the source/target level
> to the minimum supported by the current JDK. This covers about 80% of
> the packages maintained. The remaining 20% are fixed manually, one by
> one. So far the Java 9/10/11 transition has led us to update ~300
> packages, and unfortunately we are far from being done yet [3][4].
>
Do the upstream projects have maintainers and are there bugs submitted 
to the issue trackers of the upstream projects? Just curious as it seems 
that many of the issues are you wrestling with won't be solved by 
extending the support for `--release 6` to yet another release. Instead 
it seems, at least based on a quick browse of the bug report logs, that 
many of the issues relate to things were deprecated and eventually 
removed (javah, extensions mechanism, the legacy doclet API, ....) and 
it makes me wonder if some of these "packages" are actively maintained 
or not.

-Alan