On 29/11/2012 12:01 PM, Curtis Rueden wrote:
Hi Ron,
> Is it not possible to run Maven in a JRE7 VM and compile code with a
> 1.3 compiler?
If you have a JRE7 VM available, then sure. If JRE7 is not available
for your platform, then it must remain possible to run Maven with an
older JRE, or else no more Maven for you. I do not know enough about
Maven internals to know if it would be feasible to increase the
default source/target version to 1.7 while keeping Maven core itself
compatible with 1.5, though. From Jochen & Stephen's exchange, it
sounds like maybe not. If so, then my vote is for Maven core to remain
compatible with Java 1.5, as Stephen suggested.
I would be surprised if this is true since it is certainly possible to
compile with Java7 and to run Maven in a Java7 VM. I would not expect
changing a default value to affect the running of Maven.
I certainly am not suggesting doing anything to Maven itself that would
make it so that it would not run in a Java5 VM
I am sure that some of the Maven developers would like to use some of
the new Java features to make the coding easier.
Ron
> What keeps people on old versions for over 8 years(1.5)?
One reason is old hardware. For example, if you have a Mac PowerPC,
you are stuck on OS X 10.5 "Leopard", which will never run Java 7.
Another reason is old software. If you run OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard",
you are stuck with Java 6, since the OpenJDK7 and Oracle JDK 7
projects decided to require 10.7 "Lion" or newer. This might be OK if
upgrading were free, and/or if Lion were strictly an "upgrade", but it
actually removes functionality (e.g., Rosetta).
When deciding whether to start requiring Java 6 for some of our OSS
projects, we took at look at our usage statistics, and found that (as
of ~1 year ago) more than 10% of our total user base ran OS X 10.5 or
earlier. So we decided to wait a bit longer.
Regards,
Curtis
--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: rwhee...@artifact-software.com
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102
