On Sat, May 24, 2025 at 7:28 PM John Neffenger <j...@status6.com> wrote: > > I'm genuinely curious, is there a reason why Maven has not switched to > fixed release dates and Java support policies? > > Every other Java project in which I participate, including the JDK > itself, JavaFX, and NetBeans, switched long ago to predetermined release > dates and Java versions
All the projects you mention are or were Oracle supported and funded projects. None of the projects I participate in have predetermined release dates and Java versions. At one point I worked at Google on a team that specifically focused on long term support and releases for official, funded Google Cloud Platform Java client libraries, and we still didn't have pre-determined release dates, although our Java version support was much stronger than the projects you mention or Apache Maven. One of the things I learned on that team was that customers didn't want releases. That is, they actively wanted there to be no releases. We heard this regularly from paying customers who gave us enough money that even Google VPs noticed when they complained. They wanted libraries that worked and that **never** changed. They did want bug fixes and security updates, though of course they'd much prefer if there were no bugs and security issues to be fixed. The fewer and less frequent the releases the better. But they didn't want new features, new Java versions, and absolutely no changes of any kind that required them to rewrite or redeploy their own code. They wanted something they could deploy once and forget about until they retired. Steve Yegge wrote a blog post about this issue from the perspective of a paying GCP customer that was so spicy I had an "uncomfortable conversation with my manager" when I quoted it (with attribution) in an internal presentation: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc Maven, of course, doesn't have paying customers so the volunteers run a little wild and tend to chase the latest fads rather than focusing on long term support and reliability. Should anyone ever care enough about this to start paying for support and development, that might change. -- 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
