On 13.12.2007, at 09:42, Jörg Schaible wrote:
Oliver Heger wrote:
(There was a similar discussion about commons lang recently.)
Configuration used to support JDK 1.3. For the next release (either
1.6 or 2.0) I would like to drop this compatibility. The number
of feature
requests that require a newer JDK version is increasing.
This raises a couple of questions:
- To which JDK version should we switch? 1.4 or immediately to 1.5?
- Should creating a compatibility branch be considered? (I doubt that
there is enough energy and motivation for maintaining
multiple branches.)
- Does a switch in the JDK version require a major release?
- Is a new package name required (at least for a major
release if there
are binary incompatible changes)?
Any thoughts?
- go for 1.5
- take advantage of generics
- make 2.x
- use a different package name to allow 1.x and 2.x series to co-exist
- put 1.x branch into maintenance mode
- take this as chance to refactor and drop/clean-up any legacy
stuff (setDelimiter, setThrowExceptionMissing)
IMHO a lot of the current Commons components lack of activity and
contributors, since everytime someone comes along and provides
patches or requests feature support based on stuff available in
newer JDKs (e.g. Preferences for commons-configuration), it is
turned down by the "have to be compatible to JDK 1.1" argument.
While keeping compatibility is basically a good thing and
necessary, we should not hesitate and move on at some time. The new
language features of Java 5 are a good reason to do so.
However, the old versions do not suddenly vanish also. It's just,
that they don't get new features. If someone is really eager on
porting a new feature of the head revision into the 1.x branch and
make a release ... it's not forbidden.
+1!!! Frankly speaking this is probably applies to most of commons.
If commons wants to stay relevant and not become just legacy we also
need to take some steps forward.
/me points to Google collections
cheers
--
Torsten
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