Hi Shawn, If I ask the question the other way around: what does it buy us to keep Java 8 as a minimum version requirement for Lucene/Solr 9.0? This would only be helpful to users who can afford to upgrade to the latest Lucene/Solr release but can't use a JDK version that will be about 2 years old at that time. This case doesn't sound strong enough to me to keep supporting Java 8.
There are things that Java 11 is going to help with, but this is almost irrelevant to me: if we can raise the minimum version requirement to a version that is expected to be widely deployed at the time of the release then we should do it. Just because it makes things easier to reason about and to test. And then doing it early gives us time to see how we can use new Java features to make Lucene/Solr better. On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 1:49 AM Shawn Heisey <apa...@elyograg.org> wrote: > > On 3/19/2019 12:22 PM, Adrien Grand wrote: > > Now that Lucene/Solr 8.0 has shipped I'd like us to consider requiring > > Java 11 for 9.0, currently the master branch. We had 18 months between > > 7.0 and 8.0, so if we assume a similar interval between 8.0 and 9.0 > > that would mean releasing 9.0 about 2 years after Java 11, which > > sounds like a conservative requirement to me. > > What advantages to we get as developers with Java 11? I haven't been > following the advancements and don't know anything about what's new. I > knew a little bit of what Java 8 provided over Java 7, so I was more > informed the last time we did this. > > I see a short list of possible reasons we might want to adjust the minimum: > > 1) Java 11 makes life significantly better for us (committers, > contributors, casual code watchers) or significantly improves the user > experience at runtime. > 2) Achieving compatibility with 11 breaks compat with Java 8. > 3) If a functional OpenJDK 8 becomes significantly difficult to obtain. > 4) If it becomes difficult to produce binaries compatible with 8. > 5) Our dependencies increase their minimum Java version. > > If none of those applies, then continuing to provide compatibility with > Java 8 seems like a good idea. > > It does seem likely that at least one of the things in the list above > will occur in the next year or two ... and if it does, then I would be > all for it. > > Thanks, > Shawn > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@lucene.apache.org > -- Adrien --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@lucene.apache.org
