JDK 7u4 is now GA

[Dalibor Topic]

On 5/1/12 12:58 PM, Andrew Hughes wrote:
> which says there is "about a month or so left".  Then a release appears
> about two months later.  Am I missing something?

Hard to say. I think that the JavaOne strategy keynotes in Moscow & Tokio in April 
narrowed that down to 'by the end of the month', which was pretty much when it was 
released.

Historically, work on 7u2 in OpenJDK began in July, with a release in December, so
it took about 6 months. Historically, work on 7u4 began with the 7u2 rampdown, i.e. in 
September, with a release in April, so it took about 8 months. But then 7u4 also brought 
in a new port for the first time in a long time. So you have historically 6-8 months 
as the time it took to deliver a JDK 7 Update release from the first changes making 
their way into the repos to the final source code tarball.

Historically, rampdown on 7u2 began in September, with a release in December, so 
that phase took about 3 months. Historically, rampdown on 7u4 began in February,
with a release in April, so that phase took about 2 months. So you have historically
2-3 months as the time it took to deliver a JDK 7 Update release from the start of
the rampdown phase.

The other aspect of release timing you can look at are CPU releases - their dates are 
publicly known well ahead of time. See 
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html for details. 

If you line the JDK 7 Updates releases so far, you get:

7u1: October '11 (CPU)
7u2: December '11
7u3: February '12 (CPU)
7u4: April '12

so it seems like we have had an approximately 2 month cadence over the past couple of releases. 

Obviously, I can't say whether that will continue in that same fashion, as I can't predict 
the future, but I hope this helps you get a rough idea about the timing of the previous 
releases.

cheers,
dalibor topic
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