On Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 8:01 AM Benjamin Marwell <bmarw...@apache.org> wrote: > > > we need to think about companies > that pay for old JDK support > > There was a suggestion on slack that companies could provide "dev and > release manager" for Maven 3 and manage the JDK 8 Maven 3 until they lose > interest. This already works well for other projects. >
Perhaps, but we'd need to modify the release process. Today Maven and plugins can pretty much only be released by a PMC member. If you expect some other company to take it up, they'd need to be able to do so without individual PMC members and without necessarily having the same human being do the job every time. Employees move on even when the job role stays the same. Furthermore, one of the unforeseen problems Maven introduced to the Java ecosystem was that, unlike with the JDK itself, Maven artifacts can't be effectively forked because a third party can't publish under the same group ID. It is no longer feasible for someone other than the originator to release a drop-in replacement that fixes a bug. Consequently any such maintainer would need to be able to release org.apache.maven artifacts like the compiler plugin, the javadoc plugin, etc. I'm not sure Apache is willing to grant that much authority to a third party. There are alternatives from the perspective of a big tech company that has the resources to maintain their own JDK. They can switch to Gradle or even maintain and release their own idiosyncratic build tool. Or all of the above. Whether that matters here, I don't know. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elh...@ibiblio.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@maven.apache.org
