I strongly advocate for option 2. I think the biggest threat to the future of Groovy is JDK9 support.
> On Jun 13, 2018, at 3:05 AM, Paul King <pa...@asert.com.au> wrote: > > > Hi everyone, > > There was some discussion at gr8conf about how to speed up delivery of Groovy > 3.0. Some of that discussion was around the scope of what we want to include > and have yet to complete in 3.0 but I won't discuss that right now. > > One of the other discussion points was Groovy around 2.6. As many of you > know, we have released alpha versions of Groovy 2.6. That version is a > backport of most but not all of Groovy 3.0 to JDK7 including the Parrot > parser (though it isn't enabled by default). The purpose of this version has > always been to assist people/projects wanting to use the Parrot parser but > who might be stuck on JDK7. So in some sense it is an intermediate version to > assist with porting towards Groovy 3.0. While that is still a noble goal in > theory, in practice, many of our users are already on JDK8 and we have > limited resources to work on many potential areas. > > With that in mind, we'd like to understand the preferences in our user base > for the following two options: > > Option 1: please continue releasing the best possible 2.6 even if that slows > down the final release of Groovy 3.0 and delays further work on better > support for JDK9+. > > Option 2: please release one more alpha of 2.6 over the next month or so > which will become the best version to use to assist porting for users stuck > on JDK7 and then focus on 3.0. The 2.6 branch will essentially be retired > though we will consider PRs from the community for critical fixes. > > Feedback welcome. > > Cheers, Paul. > >