I suggested on the derby update PR that this thread was needed mainly
since the min version changing hadnt been discussed before that I
could recall, only that 11 should be fully supported. It wasnt clear
to me anyone had reallypreviously considered it actually changing, I
know I definitely hadnt.

In actually thinking on it further this morning, I would say
maintaining support for Java 8 is still the way to go for now. Since
it was a decent while between 8 and 9, and then both it and 10 were
essentially nixed from a support perspective even before release, many
seem to have stuck it out with 8 or were even at the time still on 7.
It feels like thats only really beginning to change now, so it seems a
little early to drop 8. Obviously some folks have though or we wouldnt
be discussing this.

If we were to drop Java 8 support now, having not previously really
been targetting Java 9+, then I'd perhaps instead go ahead and require
Java 11 at this point rather than just 9. It seems like many folks
will jump from 8 (or 7) straight up to 11 given the support
arrangements around the various releases. As such, supporting 9+10
while not also supporting 8 seems of minimal benefit at this point, it
would be the same issue for many folks, and so could largely just
prevent using the functionality from Java 11 even though thats what
many would actually be running it on for support reasons.

Robbie

On Thu, 31 Oct 2019 at 10:26, Jean-Baptiste Onofré <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi guys,
>
> As I'm working on 5.16.0 release preparation, it's important to agree
> about the minimum Java version for runtime of this version.
>
> The purpose is to fully support JDK 9+ (and so 11, 12, 13).
>
> I started some upgrade to fully support those Java versions (for
> instance Derby 10.15.1.3 upgrade).
>
> We have two options here:
>
> - still support JDK8 and run with newer version (and then, we have to
> keep JDK8 compliant dependencies, like Derby 10.14.2.0 for instance)
> - define JDK9 as minimum version to run and then, we can upgrade the
> dependencies.
>
> Thoughts ?
>
> Regards
> JB
> --
> Jean-Baptiste Onofré
> [email protected]
> http://blog.nanthrax.net
> Talend - http://www.talend.com

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