JDK 8 M6 status, and extending M7

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

The final build of M6 was promoted on 2013/1/31 (b75).  Work on the
following JEPs was not completed in time for M6, so I've retargeted
them to M7:

  104 Annotations on Java Types
  115 AEAD CipherSuites
  162 Prepare for Modularization

I've updated the milestone and feature pages [1][2] accordingly.

Looking at the updated milestones page, it's clear that we did not
achieve our goal of being Feature Complete in M6.  Over the last couple
of months we slipped a total of sixteen JEPs from M6 into M7, in some
cases in order to smooth the logistics of integrating large projects
and in others simply because more time was needed to finish the work.

The most important JEPs that we've slipped into M7 are those related to
Project Lambda, the sole driving feature of the release.  The language
and VM work for Lambda has already been integrated, but at least another
six weeks are needed to refine the stream API and finish the related
core-libraries enhancements (JEPs 107 and 109).

The other M7 JEPs are not release drivers, so in theory they could be
dropped from the release, but if Project Lambda needs more time then
there's no point in doing that.

The last build of M7, currently slated for tomorrow, is intended to be
the Developer Preview release, when we'll encourage broad testing by the
entire Java community.  We'll get the best results from that exercise if
the release is actually Feature Complete at that point, so I think we
should extend M7 accordingly.

It will take some time to determine how much of an extension is needed.
I expect to post an updated schedule in the next month or so.

- Mark


[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/milestones
[2] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/features