On 12.02.2019 23:48, Markus Koschany wrote:
Personally I would like to keep OpenJDK 8 as well but you also have to keep the following points in mind:
All these ar good reasons. The issue here is that Jdk8 -> jdk11 is a special case. Oracle decided to just change the entire release scheme to one that suits their business needs, upsetting the entire java community and all businesses. Suddenly we get new versions every 6 months. 1 year after the release of jdk 9, we are at jdk 11, and in 2 months time at jdk 12.
In this case, one has to consider the huge number of projects and businesses who invested in jdk8. Every release took many many years to get out the door, so suddenly changing the release speed, makes it time consuming for businesses to migrate their entire code base.
The entire java community, projects and businesses knows jdk-8 has EOL in december 2020, so they are running to figure out a migration plan. Most businesses are now running two jdk versions, 8 and 11 (nobody cares about 9 and 10), until they get rid of 8. And they wont care about jdk 12 or 13. Maybe Jdk 15, but that depends.
For jdk 8, a notice at installation, that jdk 8 is available only for backwards compatability until EOL, and it will not be supported after Java 8 EOL, should be enough. Only applications that actually need jdk8, will have it as its dependency. Every other apps, should buld against default-jdk. Everybody knows they would be using jdk8 with risk after EOL anyway.
An additional issue, at least for Debian, is that now any non-LTS releases only get security updates for 6 months. And, only LTS versions of java will be used in production by projects and businesses. LTS versions and Debian version dont coincide in their 5 year release plans either. So every release of Debian will have either a random jdk, which is only supported for 6 months or an LTS version that is supported for the next 3,5 years.
No matter how one looks at it, Debian needs to make a strategy change regarding OpenJdk releases and versions supported.
Regards Thomas