New informational JEP: 14: The Tip & Tail Model of Library Development

[Karsten Silz]

> On 12 Nov 2024, at 19:27, Alex Buckley <alex.buckley at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> Users who wish to stay on JDK 17 after that are free to do so -- they can look forward to 17.0.14, 17.0.15, 17.0.16, and 17.0.17 in 2025 -- but they can no longer expect new features from the library. That's OK: they don't care about new features because their applications are already deployed and don't need a new HTTP client. Users who are actively developing applications should be using the tip JDK (or the most recent LTS, 21) and will have no problem with the library's tip release being baselined on 21.

You're making two assumptions here: Users who don't update the JDK don't need new library features. And that users have no problem upgrading from JDK 17 to 21. 

It's easy to find examples where your assumptions don't hold. For instance, a company can have a JDK 17 tech stack but create new mircoservices where they try out new Spring Boot 3.2/3.3 features. Or a JDK 21 deploment held back because a dependency or something in the build pipeline or in the observability statck not supporting JDK 21. 

Do you think these exemptions of your assumptions are statistically insignificant?