Hotspot Express (HSX)

[Ron Pressler]

A great many people have used 9 and its feature updates — 9u20, 9u40, 9u60, 
9u80 or, as we now call them after the version naming change, 10, 11, 12, 
and 13.

My point is just that any kind of argument based on a major-release model 
is at odds with the new reality of how OpenJDK is actually developed (e.g. we
now merge features when they are much more mature than they used to be
back when we had major releases; the number of people working on, say, 11u, 
is 20-50x less than the number of those who'd be working on 9 had we kept 
the old version name). Instead of keeping up a confusing mirage for the 
sake of those who have not yet internalized the new model, we should help 
people understand it.

- Ron



On 21 February 2020 at 22:38:59, Volker Simonis wrote:

>  
>  
> Ron Pressler schrieb am Fr., 21. Feb. 2020, 22:30:
> >  
> > Major releases took a year to stabilize. The last major release was 9. It was  
> > released over two years ago. It's stabilized. Feature releases (or "limited
> > updates," as they were called back then) never took a year to stabilize.
>  
> No it's not, because nobody seriously used it, because it was clear from the beginning that it would only be supported for 6 month.  
>  
> That's exactly the point why nobody seriously considers non-LTS releases for production. And the reason why intermediat, overlapping MTS (Medium Term Support) releases have been proposed to solve the problem.  
>  
> 11 is LTS, it's more than a year old and it's the first release since 8 which really gains some serious adoption. But the gap from 8 to 11 is obviously quite big. Considering all the features currently under development, the gap between 11 and 17, the next LTS, might be even bigger.  
>  
> >  
> > And I think it matters a great deal whether some argument is true or not.  
> > We're not bystanders. If it's is right, then it shouldn't be and we should  
> > focus on fixing that. If it's not, then it is our responsibility to help  
> > people overcome the temporary confusion caused by the change to how we name  
> > versions and the elimination of major releases, rather than entrench that  
> > confusion.
> >  
> > - Ron
> >  
> >  
> > On 2/19/20, 23:58 PM, "Hohensee, Paul" wrote:
> >  
> > > Re JSX lack of adoption, the argument is that it's always taken at least
> > a year to stabilize a new release, and with 6 months between releases
> > none of the non-LTS releases will ever be stable. Doesn't matter whether
> > that's true or not, it's what people believe based on previous
> > experience with 8 and 11. The relatively large degree of incompatibility
> > between 8 and 11 is another hurdle. People remember that and don't want
> > to worry about language and library backward compatibility every 6
> > months, no matter how small those incompatibilities are. Doing a lot of
> > backports is a response to that customer demand. Hotspot is "under the
> > covers", so to speak, so HSX was easier to sell than is JSX.
> >  
> > > Paul
> >  
> >  
> >