On 9/10/06, Steve Cohen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Continuing the discussion:
1. Regex support is in 1.4. It's only because we were trying to stay 1.2/1.3
compatible that we couldn't use it. That's a small point. I doubt we want to
have (say) a 1.4.2 branch that requires 1.4 after having supported 1.2/1.3 for
all these years, if our soon-to-be target is 1.5. I do agree that the oro
dependency has been a very annoying pebble in the shoe.
2. I'm not comfortable with the .net5 package name. I see a cvs nightmare down
that road. I guess SVN can handle that but it's still ugly. It makes upgrade
for clients of net a maintenance nightmare.
3. > JDK 5.0 has been officially released for around
> two years. In my opinion, there shouldn't even be a debate. It should be
> taken advantage of, and supported, although not at the expense of
> existing users on older versions.
No, there unfortunately does need to be this debate. Sun has not end-of-lifed
1.4.2. That is important. They continue to release new subreleases of 1.4.2.
Why? Important clients are still not ready to use 5.0. My employer, a very
large corporation, now mandates the use of 5.0 but is forced immediately to
relent on this mandate for some of its most important projects because it also
still uses a lot of Websphere which still does not support 5.0 (and won't until
WebSphere 7 is released and even then it will be some time before the server
teams are ready to make that switch - they dragged their feet on Websphere 6
until recently). So Sun has to support 1.4 (and continues to have to make new
subreleases of 1.4.2 for reasons such as the new daylight savings time start/end
dates). The world marches on even when corporate java clients do not.
Backward compatibility's a bitch, but if Sun has to worry about this, I think we
do too. I don't think jakarta-commons has ever "downgraded" a version of java
that Sun considers live.
And yet, as Rory says, there are some compelling reasons to do so. I'd love to
use JDK 5.0. It hasn't been a possibility for me yet. Even outside of work,
for a long time Eclipse did not support 5.0 although I don't think it is
anymore.
So what is the solution? What does it mean to say "not at the expense of
existing users on older versions?" I think we'd need to modify the site to have
full support for two release branches, with some easy switch between them.
There should be navigation menu items on the 2.0 site that point back to the
1.4.x site and vice versa as is the case with Tomcat and other projects. We
can't just say all new development will be on 2.0, we'll continue to make 1.4.1
available for those who can't make the move. We may want to say that, but I
don't think our user base will let us. Until Sun EOL's 1.4.x, I think our
policy must be that every change that can be supported on pre-2.0 will be
supported there.
I also wonder if this should be a jakarta-commons-wide policy and not just
something that net does.
<snip/>
Mostly agree to Steve's note above. IMO:
* New projects have a choice to start off with 1.4 (the least version
that hasn't begun the EOL process) -- as did SCXML. Unless ofcourse,
the central concept of the component itself is based on a 1.5 (or
higher) feature.
* Older projects need to atleast support 1.4 (with active development
as in ports back from a 1.5 branch where possible etc.) until 1.4
begins to be EOL'ed. Again, above caveat will apply.
Having said that, I've been a proponent of 1.5 branches (and now
releases, as long as they're preceded by suitable discussion).
As a sidebar, Hen -- I feel your pain about having to go <=1.2 for
certain releases. Personally, I won't even think about RM'ing anything
that needs those. In the end, if its causing much grief that hampers
releases, perhaps that baseline may need revisiting.
-Rahul
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