Please stop incrementing the classfile version number when there are no format changes

[Luke Hutchison]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 1:55 PM Luke Hutchison <luke.hutch at gmail.com> wrote:

> We're coming up on 24 years since Java's initial 1.0 release. So three
> breakages in 24 years that would break any scanner (like ClassGraph) that
> ignores the classfile version number averages out to one breakage (due to
> constant pool changes) every 8 years. (I previously asserted this might
> happen once every 10 years.) But 24 years from now, assuming the 6 month
> cadence continues, any library that simply throws an exception when it
> encounters a new classfile version number (as Brian has suggested is the
> only reasonable thing to do) leads to one breakage every 6 months, or (24 *
> 2 + 1) = 45 breakages over the same period. What Brian has proposed would
> lead to breakage 45 / 8 = 5.625x as often on average. So you'd be "out of
> business" 5.625x faster if you followed this suggestion and simply balked
> at new version numbers.
>

Oops, correction to my math! 45 breakages per 24 years divided by 3
breakages per 24 years is of course 15x faster, not 5.625x faster -- it's
even worse than I claimed.