Last week, Sun Microsystems announced that it will bundle Derby with the
next major release of the reference jdk, Java SE 6, also known as
Mustang or jdk1.6. If you download the latest Mustang build, you will
see that it contains our Derby 10.2.0.3 snapshot in the "db" directory
parallel to "lib" and "bin".
This is big news. It means that over the course of the next year, Derby
will turn up on the desktops of millions of developers. Hopefully,
Derby's user and developer communities will both grow dramatically.
I would like to support this bundling. Note that Mustang will need our
vetted 10.2 release candidate by September 15 so that they can QA it.
This is expected to take about 5 weeks, after which Mustang should go GA
in late October.
The JCP requires that our JDBC4-exposing release can not be generally
available until the JDBC4 specification is finalized, which happens when
Mustang is generally available. Until that date, this means that our
final, vetted release candidate can not be officially stamped as "GA"
and we can not promote it to the various Apache mirrors.
Here are proposed dates for 10.2 milestones:
August 10 - Feature work committed. 10.2 branch created.
August 24 - Last day to commit changes for 10.2
August 25 - Begin vetting 10.2 release candidate
September 15 - Target date for finishing the voting on Derby 10.2
End of October - Expected GA of JDBC4 with Mustang
End of October - GA of Derby 10.2. Release promoted to Apache mirrors.
Are this proposal and its dates reasonable?