Hi Geertjan, On the issue of JDK version. We have run into this problem with some of our tooling. For quite some time we were stuck on Java 6 because one of our major customers was also stuck on Java 6. Developers were not allowed to install any software on their machines. Ultimately the *only* way to solve this was to create a package with our target JRE version. I now develop and deploy with JDK 14. We offer a jar. Just yesterday we got hit by a review that took the jar and complained he couldn’t run it with JDK 8. Claim was, many of their developers were working with JDK 8 and that is the version they have on their machines.
If you can’t bundle a JRE then the risk is, anyone using NB may be in the same situation. Just some food for thought. Kirk On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 23:47 Geertjan Wielenga <geert...@apache.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > We’re getting close to the 12.0 release and nb-javac won’t be available at > the time of release. What nb-javac provides is detailed elsewhere but in > summary it is a fork of the javac finetuned to the Java Editor in > NetBeans. It can’t be donated to Apache NetBeans because it is a javac fork > and hence GPL licensed, so Oracle does not want to donate it and Apache > projects can’t be released with it. > > Ultimately, we’d like to drop the need for nb-javac completely. That will > simplify things a lot. Plus, that is increasingly possible because from JDK > 9 onwards we’re able to use the javac from the JDK that NetBeans runs on > for the same purposes as nb-javac. > > And we’ve (especially Jan Lahoda) been enhancing Apache NetBeans over the > past releases to enable the vanilla javac from the JDK on which NetBeans > runs to be used increasingly better. And ultimately, of course, this should > not be based on the JDK on which NetBeans runs, but on the JDK used by a > particular project. > > Anyway, there have been one or two pull requests around the above, such as > this one: > > https://github.com/apache/netbeans/pull/2108 > > A question is what about JDK 8. My bold suggestion would be that we > explicitly tell our users that they can’t use our Java Editor if they’re > running NetBeans on JDK 8. I’m not saying that we should drop support for > JDK 8. I’m saying we should show a message that the user should switch to > the latest supported JDK for running NetBeans itself on (which of course > does not mean that a project can’t use any earlier JDK). > > Anyway, comments and thoughts welcome. > > Gj >
