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

[joe darcy]

On 5/14/2018 8:05 AM, Fridrich Strba wrote:
> Alan,
>
> On 14/05/18 15:51, Alan Bateman wrote:
>> 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.
> This is not an objection in principle to dropping some compatibilities.
> This is just us begging you for mercy at this moment. If one of the
> first commits to the jdk tree after jdk10 branch-off was deprecating the
> --release 6 option, I would have enough time to switch all packages to
> --release 8 compatibility as to be on the safe side. At this moment,
> since at the day or SLE release, OpenJDK 10 will be active and OpenJDK
> 11 not even released, I will have to push OpenJDK 11 to SLE as a
> maintenance update. If suddenly hundreds of packages stop building
> because we specify 6 as compatibility, I will be in a deep s**t. So, I
> am begging you for mercy for this time. That is all I am asking for.
>

Note that as of JDK 9 javac prints out warnings message like

     warning: [options] source value 1.6 is obsolete and will be removed 
in a future release
     warning: [options] target value 1.6 is obsolete and will be removed 
in a future release

upon use of 6/1.6 as an argument to -source/-target/--release. In other 
words, the 6/1.6 release value is already "deprecated", but still accepted.

After 6/1.6 is removed, 7/1.7 will be deprecated in turn.

Cheers,

-Joe