Hi all, Currently the `release-2.x` branch must be run using JDK 8 and uses Maven's toolchains to compile Java 9+ code. This has many drawbacks: * It is difficult for new contributors to run the build process, * It requires a change to `JAVA_HOME` each time we build `release-2.x`. I suppose most of you use a different default Java version, * the latest Maven Surefire plugin fails to run if there are Java 9+ classes on the classpath: it performs a class scan in the current JVM and forks only afterwards.
>From my own tests the `--release 8` switch on JDK 9+ works quite well (i.e. the signatures of the JRE methods are those from JRE 8, not JRE 9+, the classes use the correct bytecode version and it produces errors if we use Java 9+ language features). Maybe we could switch to compiling `release-2.x` using Java 11 with the `--release 8` after 2.18.0 is out? I would keep the toolchains configuration exclusively for the Maven Surefire plugin: it would scan the test classes using the current JVM and fork an authentic JVM 8 to run the tests. What do you think? Piotr
