F21 System Wide Change: Java 8

[Mikolaj Izdebski]

On 03/26/2014 05:52 PM, Stanislav Ochotnicky wrote:
> On Wed 26 Mar 2014 05:29:55 PM CET Christopher wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 9:31 AM, Deepak Bhole <dbhole at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> * Christopher <ctubbsii at apache.org> [2014-03-25 19:59]:
>>>> I also would like to see 1.7.0 stick around for awhile. Not
>>>> necessarily as the default, but at least available in the repos. As it
>>>> stands, it's difficult to use a modern Fedora on projects that are
>>>> still developing against JDK 1.6.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, OpenJDK7 will be EOLd in April 2015[1], which is within
>>> the support time-frame of the F21. This is one the reasons why we would
>>> like to be able to switch over to OpenJDK8 asap for F21.
>>>
>>> 1: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html
>>
>> I don't see how Oracle tentatively dropping long-term public support
>> for 7 means that Fedora needs can no longer provide OpenJDK7 in its
>> repos (not as default, of course), with or without additional updates,
>> for developers who want to use a modern Fedora, but need to develop
>> for applications/hardware that requires strict 7 compatibility.
>>
>> The alternative is Fedora fans will be forced to use an older version
>> of Fedora, use a different Linux distro, or find some hackish
>> workaround (yum --releasever=20 ...; which is problematic, because
>> every version 8 update will obsolete 7, just like 7 currently does
>> with 6 packages), or download untrusted 3rd party packages.
>>
>> It seems to me that support in Fedora would be pretty easy: just make
>> sure it doesn't cause a packaging conflict and recommend the newer
>> JDK8. Maybe call it -compat? But, I defer to the experts on Fedora
>> packaging/support policies and decisions. I'm just a user, and don't
>> know all the implications for trying to include it. I just think it'd
>> be nice to keep around.
> 
> It's not a question if we can have multiple parallel JDKs (we already
> can, you can install 7 and 8 at the same time).
> 
> What we *can't* have in Fedora is a high-profile package which doesn't
> receive security updates upstream and there is nobody in Fedora willing
> and capable of doing that.
> 
> What's the big deal with using '--target 1.7' anyway? That covers 99% of
> use cases, and any possible problems will have to be caught by CI
> running whatever you'd be deploying on anyway.

Even with --target 1.7 you can still use some Java 8 features provided
by standard library, which are not available in Java 7.  That's the
reason tools like animal-sniffer were created.

-- 
Mikolaj Izdebski