Backporting features [was Re: RFR (11u, XXL): Upstream/backport Shenandoah to JDK11u]

[Andrew Haley]

On 2/17/20 5:39 PM, Claes Redestad wrote:
> Why is this not framed as a need to get help upgrading? Why are we not
> investing all this time in the future, rather than in delaying the
> inevitable?
>
> Life is too short for backports.

Y'know, I have a lot of sympathy for that point of view. I never
entered this business with the ambition of supporting vintage
software, yet here we are.

However, when the big change that was JDK 9 came along I said fairly
confidently that we were going to have to support JDK 8 for the next
twenty years. While that was partly a jest, it had a certain grain of
truth. One consequence of that is backports.

One other thing: we must remember that people have a choice. They are
not prisoners to Java. If we withhold backports in order to persuade
them to jump to later JDK releases we're forcing them to do work, and
some of them might just port to some other platform altogether.

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
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