Thanks for the continuing discussion, everyone. Here is a 3rd rev of the
proposal:
A) The 10.11 release will support Java 8, 7, and 6. The development
trunk will no longer support Java 5 and CDC.
B) We expect that maintenance releases on a branch will continue to
support the same Java versions as the initial feature release cut from
that branch. We will document this on the wiki.
C) Developers will need to keep in mind the porting implications of
using modern JVM features in code which may need to be reworked to run
on older JVMs. Some explanation will be helpful when exploiting a modern
language feature for the first time.
Adopting this policy would result in the following changes to the 10.11
trunk:
I) Removing build support for Java 5 and CDC.
II) Purging user doc references to Java 5, CDC, and the JDBC 4 DataSources.
III) Removing the JDBC 4 version of the public api from the published
javadoc. The recently introduced CP2 DataSources would need to migrate
to the JDBC 3 version of the published javadoc. The JDBC 4 versions of
the DataSources would still exist, but they would be vacuous extensions
of their JDBC 3 counterparts.
D) We do not anticipate that this policy will require any changes to
user code.
