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.
Just my 2 cents,
Jörg
This is pretty much the reaction I was hoping for :-)
So I will probably follow this road. This is a good opportunity for a
refactoring and polishing of some interfaces and base classes. Because
we will have major changes, changing the package name (maybe to
o.a.c.configuration2?) will certainly make sense.
It would be good however to handle this commons-wide in a consistent way.
Oliver
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