Re: The meaning, or not, of “LTS”

[Remi Forax]

----- Mail original -----
> De: "Brian Goetz" <brian.goetz at oracle.com>
> À: "cay" <cay at horstmann.com>
> Cc: "jdk-dev" <jdk-dev at openjdk.java.net>
> Envoyé: Dimanche 16 Mai 2021 16:29:31
> Objet: Re: The meaning, or not, of “LTS”

> The obvious thing happens.  The spec is versioned, so if the 17 spec calls for
> preview features, those features in that state are part of the 17 spec forever.
> We don’t anticipate running MRs to remove them, though we also expect their
> use to decline after the first 6-12 months as the bleeding edge users will have
> moved on to the new hotness.
> 
> In terms of “keeping them alive”, since it is risky to run with preview features
> in production — which is what attracts most users to LTS — we expect the
> maintenance load in practice to be low.

Apart the security issue that will still need to be patched even if very few people use incubator modules after the first 6 months,
i agree/hope that the maintenance should be low.

Rémi

> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On May 16, 2021, at 8:37 AM, Cay Horstmann <cay.horstmann at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 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
>> 
>> --
>> 
> > Cay S. Horstmann | http://horstmann.com | mailto:cay at horstmann.com