Support plans for JDK9? was [Re: RFR [9], 2018-04-12, Bulk backports to sh/jdk9]

[Aleksey Shipilev]

On 04/12/2018 10:25 PM, Jerven Bolleman wrote:
> I am a little bit curious about your continued hard work to backport Shenandoah to JDK-9.
> It was my understanding that the idea was to have JDK-9 be a short term support version which
> was not going to get any maintenance love once JDK-10 was out. 

On one hand, this is a historical accident: our backporting process is built in such a way that it
is convenient to have the intermediate step from sh/jdk10 on the way to sh/jdk8u. On the other hand,
there is also cost/benefit considerations. Today, it does not hurt us too much to make this step
("cost is low"). There are adopters who have just finished their migration to 9, but not ready for
10, e.g. due to EE modules removal ("benefit is high").

So, having sh/jdk9 available for testing makes sense today, but we might consider dropping it in future.

> I know that this the position of Oracle and that you all work for RedHat ;) So what I wanted to
> know is if RedHat is planning (or maybe idly contemplating) to have a different support cycle
> than Oracle for JDK-9 and 10.
We cannot comment on Red Hat strategy regarding officially-supported releases here :) See what
Fedora and RHEL ships, and/or plans to ship.

Thanks,
-Aleksey