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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SAMZA-455?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=14196418#comment-14196418
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E. Sammer commented on SAMZA-455:
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Unfortunately, at least in the enterprise space, EOL dates don't matter. Many
of the fortune 500 crowd either have extended long term support contracts on
older versions or have other systems that rely on Java 6 (and then standardize
on it). At Cloudera (a reasonable sample size of the F500 space), we finally
were able to default to Java 7 for new installs recently, but all build systems
still had to `-target 1.6`. Anecdotally, I'd say ~50% of the F500 constituency
still uses Java 6 unless you truly kick and scream. My experience is that it's
not a show stopper, but it's a barrier to adoption. For a new project such as
Samza, I would want to remove absolutely any potential hang ups that would
occur on first deploy and development.
My strawman is to support Java 6 for another N months, declare it deprecated,
and state that, as of release M, Java 7 will be required. That gives folks a
good solid warning, time for the project to see more early adoption (I think
the noise is just really starting), and, to Jakob's point, a concrete date to
look forward to for the Samza community.
(N = ~6)
> Decide on Java 6 support policy
> -------------------------------
>
> Key: SAMZA-455
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SAMZA-455
> Project: Samza
> Issue Type: Wish
> Reporter: Martin Kleppmann
>
> Currently Samza builds against JDK 7, although AFAIK we are not yet using
> JDK7-only language/stdlib features, so we could still support JDK6 if we want
> to. There have been requests for this:
> * [Eric Sammer|https://twitter.com/esammer/status/516681461219737600]
> * [Tommy
> Becker|http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-samza-dev/201411.mbox/%3C5458CF13.6080108%40tivo.com%3E]
> In June/July there was a [mailing list
> discussion|http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-samza-dev/201406.mbox/%3CCADiKvVuvxRH8eP60pXx7AUPOzzdtxzDvNNpdc5%2B6%2BeQ90nqCMQ%40mail.gmail.com%3E]
>
> ([continued|http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-samza-dev/201407.mbox/%3CCFD85452.2C7BA%25criccomini%40linkedin.com%3E]
> — Apache's mailing list archive doesn't do threading across a month
> boundary) on which JDK versions to support. There was a general desire to
> start moving towards JDK8, so that we could start using Java 8 language
> features and gradually start moving away from Scala. But we can't use Java 8
> language features as long as we're still supporting JDK 6 and JDK 7, and the
> day when everyone is using JDK 8+ still seems fairly far in the future.
> JDK 6 was [EOL in Feb
> 2013|http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html], but if there is
> continued demand for it, perhaps we should continue supporting it. The
> counter-argument is that "JDK6 seems to be becoming the Windows XP of the
> Hadoop ecosystem", as [~jghoman] put it.
> So: should we switch Samza back to building on JDK 6? And if so, can we
> decide on a policy for removing JDK 6 support?
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