For several years now, the target environment for official Fedora Commons Repository builds has been Java 5. This means the jars that are distributed are built and verified to run on Java 5. We also have been doing regular tests under Java 6, since most people are on that these days, but have so far kept Java 5 compatibility because the move to Java 6 source compatibility hasn't seemed that compelling.
However: On November 3rd, 2009, J2SE 5 reached its End Of Service Life. This means publicly-available updates to Sun's Java 5 will no longer be done. I think this news alone is enough for us to strongly consider moving our official build/test environment for Fedora to Java 6. But I wanted to point out a few other things to consider: It's becoming harder for developers to obtain the Java 5 SDK. A couple examples: - Apple has removed Java 1.4 and 1.5 from Snow Leopard. - Sun Java 1.5 is no longer available in the latest Ubuntu (9.10) standard package repositories. For Fedora development, if we moved to Java6-only compatibility, we could: - Get rid of the JDBC version code-rewriting hack during the build - Start using certain annotations and core library methods/classes that were newly introduced since 1.6 - Remove Java5 from future test plans (shortening the test cycle for now...) Are there any downsides at this point? I know the big appserver vendors were initially slow to move to 1.6, but AFAIK (and especially with the 1.5 EOSL issue), everybody's there now. - Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Fedora-commons-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fedora-commons-developers
