Hi all, Oracle has recently announced a new release policy for Java [1][2], to sum it up: - new major Java revisions will now be released every 6 months - there will be non-LTS releases supported for 6 months, and LTS releases supported 5+ years - LTS releases will be cut every 3 years - Java 9 is *not* a LTS release, the next one will be Java 11 (previously named Java 18.9), to be released in September 2018
This is of course the policy for Oracle Java, not OpenJDK. It's not clear at this point if other players like Red Hat intend to support non-LTS OpenJDK releases longer than 6 months. Assuming that Debian will stick to the LTS releases as defined by Oracle I can see the following consequences: - openjdk-9 will not be part of Buster, and we should aim for openjdk-11 instead. - If the freeze for buster starts in December 2018, we'll barely have 2 months to complete the transition. Ideally we should start testing sooner with pre-release builds. - If we keep openjdk-8 as the default JRE until openjdk-11 is ready we may not catch runtime issues with the latest JREs and fix them in time for the freeze. This means we should probably change the default JRE as soon as possible to openjdk-9/10 but keep openjdk-8 in the archive as a possible fallback if we can't complete the transition to openjdk-11 before the freeze. - After Java 11 the next LTS would be Java 17 to be released in September 2021, probably after the Debian 11 release which would thus ship the same JRE than Debian 10. Emmanuel Bourg [1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html [2] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk-dev/2017-November/000089.html
