Hello
I know i have not been really active for some time now (changed house,
then job) yet I manage to remember previous discussions.
I still feel that the following reasoning is flawed:
There has been some discussion about dropping support for Java 1.3 in
trunk. One of the aguments against it was that 1.4 doesn't offer
anything new and going from 1.3 to Java5 was too big a step.
I do think the problem is that we cannot support a whole lot of java
versions for every new version of ant, just because of the amount of
work associated with testing it all.
The choice should not only be based on what new language features are
offered by a java version, but also the number of java version we have
to test against.
If companies/projects/products have a good reason to stay with older
java versions, the older version of ant that is supported has done all
this time, and I think we should expect from companies that stay with
older java versions that these companies shall bear the consequence of
not being able to run the newest ant.
Maybe we should consider dropping java versions even somewhat faster, I
don't see the point in supporting java versions that SUN does not
support anymore for the general public.
From the sun website:
http://java.sun.com/products/archive/eol.policy.html
Revised (Current) Java SE Support Road map
Release Family GA Date EOL Notification EOSL Support Period
1.4 February, 2002 December, 2006 October 30, 2008 6 ½ years
------------------------------------------------------------------------
5.0 May, 2004 April, 2008 October 30, 2009 5 ½ years
------------------------------------------------------------------------
6 December, 2006 2009* 2010* 4 years*
These dates seem to be reasonable to stop supporting the corresponding
java release in an upcoming ant release
(if ant 1.8 appears after october 30, 2008 the 1.8 range should support
5.0 and 6 and possibly 7)
We in turn we could consider to prolong the life of the point releases
for critical updates to have at lease one ant version operating with the
java version upto the state EOSL from SUN.
Bugs eligible to be solved on the point releases after a new major
release has been done would have to come from customers running a java
version that is not supported by a more recent ant release, running a
java version that is still supported by SUN, these should also be real
bugs, not feature requests, and the company shall have to test the ant
release towards the old java version and provide us the logs, especially
if we do not have the possibility to run the old java version anymore.
(This because I am quite sure that in 10 years java 1.4 won't be running
anymore on the "current" hardware and operating systems.)
Java SE for Business support road map
Release Family GA Date EOL Notification* EOL* EOSL* Support
Period
1.4 February, 2002 April, 2008 April, 2013 April, 2018 16 years
------------------------------------------------------------------------
5.0 May, 2004 June, 2009 June, 2014 June, 2019 15 years
------------------------------------------------------------------------
6 December, 2006 June, 2011 June, 2016 June, 2021 15 years
br Martijn
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