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

[Emmanuel Bourg]

Le 14/05/2018 à 15:51, Alan Bateman a écrit :

> Do the upstream projects have maintainers and are there bugs submitted
> to the issue trackers of the upstream projects?

Yes we do forward the fixes when the upstream projects are still alive,
but many are no longer actively maintained unfortunately. And for Linux
distributions rebuilding everything from sources, changes like stricter
Javadoc rules, javac source/target modifications, tools removal and API
deprecations hit us hard.


> 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.

Yes they are, but we lack the manpower to actively fix mere build
warnings that might break in the future. Packages are usually updated
when a new version is available, to address security issues or fix build
failures caused by toolchain changes. But we don't update packages just
for replacing javah until it actually breaks.

Emmanuel Bourg