Re: The meaning, or not, of “LTS”

[Cay Horstmann]

What happens with experimental, preview, and incubator features that are 
introduced in an LTS and subsequently modified? Are providers of an LTS 
obligated to keep the feature in its unmodified form, or may they drop 
it or replace it with a later version? I am just wondering about the 
effort of keeping an obsolete feature version alive for many years.

Thanks,

Cay

On 14/05/2021 00:37, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
> I’ve heard a few contributors report that they’ve received advice along
> the lines of, “since JDK 17 is an LTS we should focus on stability, and
> avoid doing major enhancements.”
> 
> This suggests that the stability of non-LTS releases is not important,
> but nothing is further from the truth.  We should focus on stability
> in every JDK release, since every JDK release is meant to be ready for
> production use.  That a release is designated an LTS release is no
> reason to hold back on innovation.
> 
> If you have an enhancement that will preserve stability and is ready to
> integrate then, by all means, please proceed with the usual high level
> of care and consideration.  Whether the target release is an LTS or not
> is, in almost all ways, completely irrelevant.
> 
> - Mark
> 

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Cay S. Horstmann | http://horstmann.com | mailto:cay at horstmann.com