On 25/02/2016 13:52, Rémy Maucherat wrote: > Hi, > > This has been hinted at in the past, but is not being discussed anymore. > > Possible options: > a) Release a new 8.x branch that would include the connectors from 9 to > support HTTP/2 [OpenSSL now allows realistic support without having to wait > for Java 9], and thus would remove a few legacy items.
This should be doable but we'd need to think about the how to make sure we didn't loose history for code that becomes 8.1.x. > b) A more radical option is to use 9 as 8.x but remove the Servlet API > changes. This would force Java 8 and many incompatible changes. Eclipse tells me there are ~200 errors if I try to build Tomcat 9 with Java 7. Those errors have maybe a handful of root causes of which only one looks to be non-trivial (http2.FrameType) but even that is a relatively simple fix. The Java 7 issues look solvable. That there are *lots* of other API changes and that is likely to be more significant. > c) Give up on 8.x and instead release 9 as beta, then stable, with an > explicit exception about the Servlet 4 API additions being "preview" until > further notice. That's probably the solution which involves the least > effort by far. I assume you mean give up on 8.next and continue to maintain 8.0.x. > d) Nothing. No 8.x release. 9 will be released sometimes in 2017 when > Servlet 4 is released. The main issue is that there's no HTTP/2 support > until then. The longer we wait, the more a major release will conflict with > the "intuitive" 9 release cycle in 2017. I don't see any other options than the ones you propose. Of those options I prefer option b) at the moment. We should probably call it 8.5 since the degree of API change is significant - like it was in 5.0 to 5.5. After that, I have roughly equal preference for a) or c). a) was what I originally had in mind but b) has since started to look more attractive. I don't think d) is a viable option. It leaves the new features in 9.0.x in alpha for too long. Regardless of the option we choose, an open question is how long do we support 8.0 in parallel with 8.next? For 5.0/5.5 it was about 2 months. I'd be prepared to do release management in parallel for ~6 months. Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@tomcat.apache.org