> > > I am running Maven inside of Jenkins inside of WebSphere on AIX. I am > currently hosting Jenkins under WAS 6.1 on AIX 5.3. Whilst AIX 5.3 is > nearing (or may have reached it's EOS), WAS 6.1's EOS dates have *just been > extended* by a year! > > You know that Jenkins is looking like going Java 1.6+ in the core, right? And I suspect virtually all plugins are getting compiled against 1.6 these days. I know mine are.
Are you saying that AIX 5.3 has no 1.6 JDK, or that WAS 6.1 doesn't work on a 1.6 JDK (which would be... terrifying) ? > Additionally, although the Sun/Oracle Java 1.5 may have been EOS'd quite a > while ago, the IBM Java 1.5/5 is most definately not EOS. Please see: > http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/lifecycle/index.html. > > Running on AIX, we have one choice in JDK: IBM. > > The IBM 1.5/5 EOS is Sept 2015! > > The reality is that we have lots of WebSphere servers running in large data > centres. So simply stating "just upgrade java" (assuming that it is running > under Tomcat or similar) is simply not an option for us. > > Whilst I do realise that very (1.5% by your [Jenkins] figures {I suspect > that maven figures are similar]) few of us still run on 1.5, some of us > will simply not be able to upgrade to a newer version of WAS/JDK as a > simple task. It's not as easy as clicking your fingers. > > I also do wonder how many installations are in said data centres and are > unable to report their presence. So I do believe that the 1.5% figure would > be low, but certainly within an order of magnitude. > > So, please do not cut us off from future updates. > > I think what irritates developers is this sort of call is parsed as, effectively, "please chain yourselves, corporate-style, to something totally obsolescent because some dinosaur refuses to upgrade". Whilst that is the kind of thing you just have to suck up in a $dayjob - because there's money flowing (I bet IBM take hefty fee for this support) - in OSS where it's often being done 'for fun' rather than 'for money'', what's the incentive? They're simply not going to care terribly much, no matter how many WAS instances you happen to have. For many people it's *all about* the "shiny and new". It's not like the old versions are going away. e.g: If you were stuck on a 1.4 JVM, Maven 2.0.11 is still there for download. Jenkins has a LTS edition, and commercial support providers. I'm sure Maven does too. If you're stuck in an environment where you can only run an 8-year-old JVM, you might want to see if you can buy a support contract to fix any bugs that are in your old editions. Alternatively, look upon it as OSS doing you a big favour. As your platform becomes no longer supported, you should have a much easier time building the business case for moving on to something more appropriate for 2013. ;-)
