How about a transition period? Perhaps we should wait a month after
Java SE 6 goes GA and then poll the community to see if anyone objects
to requiring Java SE 6 at that time?
I'm worried that we are narrowing the pool of potential developers when
I think we still want to grow the community. From this blog entry it
seems even in Feb 2006 most Java developers were using JDK 1.4. Somehow
I don't see a sudden jump to Java SE 6 one month after it goes GA.
Just wanted to add my 2 cents, as follows:
First, I'd like us to be conservative about when we eliminate support for
older JVMs. Dropping support for 1.3 seems reasonable, but I think
1.4 will be in widespread use for several more years at least.
Second, I think it's possible to distinguish between the developer
community and the user community. Requiring a certain setup to build and
modify the code is not necessarily the same as requiring a certain setup
to download and use the pre-built code.
Last, and somewhat in contradiction with my second point, I think it's
useful for the build-and-test setup that the development community uses
to be as close as possible to the execution-time setup that most users use,
because it helps reduce the chance that we accidentally build in a
dependency on some Java feature that we didn't knowingly mean to depend on.
thanks,
bryan
