Picking up from http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/maven-dev/201511.mbox/%3CCA%2BnPnMyjogmqRweYbxLuULLB9ve2P6MPcQuH%2BPkxcNn-oN4GPg%40mail.gmail.com%3E (and my follow up to that but archive.apache.org is being a tad slow)
Here is our policy: The development line of Maven core should require a minimum JRE version > that is no older than 18 months after the end of Oracle's public updates > for that JRE version at the time that the first version of the development > line was released, but may require a higher minimum JRE version if other > requirements dictate a higher JRE version (Source: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/Version+number+policy) OK, so it's a draft policy... but we've all been silent on the draft, so lazy consensus! Now in http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/eol-135779.html they state: after April 2015, Oracle will not post further updates of Java SE 7 to its > public download sites So per our (draft) version number policy, we can keep Java 7 as the baseline :-( or we can choose to upgrade code to Java 8 (because we want to use lambdas... there's a requirement) So assuming we bump the master branch of Maven core to 3.4.0, what Java version do we want to use as the baseline? There are thankfully only two options: Java 7 + Not actually changing things + May make it easier to drive adoption - Still can't use newer language features in core - Java 7 is EOL and it may get harder for developers to source JDKs to test and develop against Java 8 + We're not as old hat any more + We can use lambdas + We can use Nashorn (may make integrating with Node easier... certainly could make integrating with JavaScript tooling easier) + EOL for Java 8 is at least Sep 2017 (and may be later) - May be harder to drive adoption in shops that have issues upgrading Java (but toolchains and they likely wouldn't upgrade to 3.4.x anyway unless there are features dragging their change controlled heels over the line) So... Let's have a heated debate! -Stephen P.S. I'm waiting for Chris to chime in about how IBM is still supporting Java 1.3 or something like that ;-)
