I personally don't think we should constrain ourselves to supporting End of Life'd versions of Java: anyone wanting to use an older version of Java can download an older version of Ant. That being said, Ant doesn't introduce major new features particularly often so we may not be losing too much by not using the latest Java APIs available to us.
My preference would be to move our mainline development to compile against the current versions of Java with public support - so currently Java 1.8 and 1.9 - with an increment in minor version number of Ant to reflect this change that may break some peoples' environments. I also think we should consider creating a "Long Term Support" style branch for the previous version where we back-port fixes where possible - i.e. where any changed dependencies don't require a new version of Java, and the changed code hasn't used a new Java API and isn't specifically introducing new features. This may increase the work required to perform a release, but the back-port of fixes is manageable given our use of Git, and can be pretty thoroughly checked with our automated Unit and Integration tests. We may also have to perform some work on our Bugzilla to make it clear which issues need ported between versions, or only affect a specific release branch of Ant. Thanks, Michael On 6 March 2016 at 17:09, Andre-John mas <andrejohn....@gmail.com> wrote: > Consider Enterprise is often 2 versions (maybe 3 versions) behind latest > JDK, at lease based on my own experience, so 7 should still be included? > > Sent from my tablet > > > On Mar 6, 2016, at 10:31, Fernando Cassia <fcas...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > >> On 3/6/16, Stefan Bodewig <bode...@apache.org> wrote: > >> I think it's time to drop support for Java5 and - as we've done in the > >> past - bump the second part of Ant's version number to reflect the > >> change. > > > > +1 > > > >> I'm not sure whether moving to Java6 is worth the effort since it has > >> been EOLed as well, even Java7 is no longer officially supported by > >> Oracle > > > > Isn't Java 6 the baseline API for Android development? Do Android IDEs > use ant? > > Just thinking aloud... > > > >> but personally I wouldn't want to require Java8 right now. > > > > Why? OpenJDK 8 is included in most Linux distros. > > > >> So do we want to move on and if so, what should become our new baseline? > > > > That's a timely and relevant discussion, as just an ant user, and a > > lurker on this list, I'm all ears. :) > > > > FC > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org > > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org > >
