I still would like to discuss this a bit further before making final decisions. Maybe other people change their position as well (or I revert mine again ;) ). Let me bring more meat into the thing by giving what
(1) Geir Magnusson Jr says about it:
The Slide community has a problem to make a decision if JDK 1.3 support, which was guaranteed in the Slide 2.0 release, shall be discontinued in the 2.1 release. While committers and contributors agreed to switch to JDK 1.4 there were voices from users who asked to retain JDK 1.3 compatibility.
Is there any general rule in Jakarta for (a) discontinuing JDK in a feature release (e.g. 2.0 -> 2.1)
My personal opinion is that dropping support for 1.3, a very popular JDK used in a lot of production is a bad idea if you don't have to, and if you do, doing it in a feature release is a worse one
There are going to be people stuck on 1.3 for a long time coming. Maybe call 3.0 your 1.4 release? Let people maintain 2.x in parallel w/ 3.x?
(b) JDK support in general
I am pretty new to the whole Apache thing and am rather clueless what to do here. Is the voice of committers and contributors to be preferred over the voice of the user?
There's no official policy. My personal opinion - I think users are the engine that drives things, and is where your next committers are coming from...
geir
(2) and what Stefan Bodewig thinks:
On Tue, 01 Jun 2004, Oliver Zeigermann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Is there any general rule in Jakarta for
No "general rule" coming from thre PMC, this really is a decision each project has to take separately. Like Geir I can only voice my opinion here. Maybe this would be a topic for the general list?
(a) discontinuing JDK in a feature release (e.g. 2.0 -> 2.1)
When Ant went from 1.5 to 1.6, we dropped support for JDK 1.1 and some users have been unhappy about it. You have to ask yourself what a switch is going to give as a gain to you as developers as well as the users - and contrast this with what you lose.
I know that one of our bigger customers is using an application server farm on top of JDK 1.3 and that they'd be very unwilling to move on to 1.4 (read, they'd rather terminate our contract). They've just come from JDK 1.1 about eighteen months ago. In my experience, big shops are rather slow in moving.
What are the reasons you want to switch? Are they relevant to your users at all?
Is the voice of committers and contributors to be preferred over the voice of the user?
In the end, those who do the work make the decisions.
If maintaining compatibility to JDK 1.3 is too difficult to do, nobody is going to care for it and you either silently drop support for it (by not recognizing that your code won't work on JDK 1.3) or stop getting any work done at all.
I'm with Geir that you shouldn't take the decision lightly and that you really ought to listen to your users, but finally the committers have to decide. If the users can't convince you to stick with JDK 1.3, what else could?
Stefan
I think both positions have their pros and cons...
Oliver
Jacob Lund wrote:
I guess a lot of people can understand this angel - do we need to post retraction votes or do we simply drop this subject for now?
/jacob
----- Original Message ----- From: "Oliver Zeigermann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Slide Developers Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: [VOTE] 2.1 supports JDK1.4 only
Call me insane or weak-minded, but even though I initiated this vote I will have to change my vote from +1 to -1.
To release something incompatible in a feature release (2.0 -> 2.1) really isn't somehing that puts trust into users and might bring people already using 2.0 into big trouble.
Even though the time to think about a 3.0 release certainly is not now, we should defer JDK 1.4 plans to 3.0...
Sorry for causing inconvenience, it simply was my fault to prematurely bring this to a vote :(
Oliver
To concentrate on a single JDK and have the nice features of JDK 1.4
avaialble (NIO for the tx file store and maybe other stuff, Logging, Exceptions having causes, etc.) I propose to support JDK1.4 (no longer JDK1.3) for the next 2.1 release.
This means my vote for this is +1
Please vote:
- +1: Yes, please - +-0: I do not care - -1: No, because...
Cheers, Oliver
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