Proposed implementation of JEP 182 in JDK 11: drop javac support for -source/-target/--release 6

[Fridrich Strba]

Alan,

On 14/05/18 15:51, Alan Bateman wrote:
> Do the upstream projects have maintainers and are there bugs submitted
> to the issue trackers of the upstream projects? Just curious as it seems
> that many of the issues are you wrestling with won't be solved by
> extending the support for `--release 6` to yet another release. Instead
> it seems, at least based on a quick browse of the bug report logs, that
> many of the issues relate to things were deprecated and eventually
> removed (javah, extensions mechanism, the legacy doclet API, ....) and
> it makes me wonder if some of these "packages" are actively maintained
> or not.

This is not an objection in principle to dropping some compatibilities.
This is just us begging you for mercy at this moment. If one of the
first commits to the jdk tree after jdk10 branch-off was deprecating the
--release 6 option, I would have enough time to switch all packages to
--release 8 compatibility as to be on the safe side. At this moment,
since at the day or SLE release, OpenJDK 10 will be active and OpenJDK
11 not even released, I will have to push OpenJDK 11 to SLE as a
maintenance update. If suddenly hundreds of packages stop building
because we specify 6 as compatibility, I will be in a deep s**t. So, I
am begging you for mercy for this time. That is all I am asking for.

Cheers

Fridrich