For one thing you must use Java 1.5.
AFAIK Java *is* backwards compatible and allows to set
an language level for the compiler - there's no need to
have several old JDK versions installed.
With ANT the user can set the required level (and it's considered
a good practice to do so) ,e.g.:
<javac srcdir="${src}" destdir="${build}" source="1.4"/>I suppose something similar should be available for maven too.Again, the problem still remains: the average user can't build (at least not always), but worst, can't fix the problem itself like with ANT :(.
A.
