On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Sudhir Khanger <ml@sudhirkhanger.com> wrote:

On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 5:06 AM, Christopher <ctubbsii-fedora@apache.org> wrote:
> to warrant the pursuit of -target 1.7 in its build

Would it have caused technical problems to have included both 1.7 or
1.8 as targets?

Either I'm not understanding you, or you're not understanding the problem. F21 could have built as -target 1.7 and run on the provided Java 8 JVM, but also could have run under a user-specified Java 7 JVM (assuming there weren't any bootstrap classpath problems that would have prevented such a build, which there are... but it may not matter for Eclipse and its dependencies). I can't imagine there would be any reason to build Eclipse for both, unless Eclipse itself has some internal restriction that prevents it from building projects using Java 8, when itself was built with Java 7. The fact that there isn't a 1.7 JDK to build against properly, to address the bootstrap classpath problem, is not a technical problem, so much as a policy that prevented OpenJDK7 from being packaged alongside OpenJDK8 in F21.

Even if you could build Eclipse targetted for 1.7, I'm not sure there's any point, except to support running an older JRE that the user manually downloaded. I'm not sure it should be a goal that Fedora's packages be built to run on top of VMs that are older than the ones provided... that seems nonsensical. Developing *for* those older VMs, sure, but not running the build tools, like Eclipse, on them. It just seems like a completely pointless endeavor.

--
Christopher L Tubbs II
http://gravatar.com/ctubbsii