Hi
I am arriving a little late to this disucussion, so please forgive me if
this is old news or I have misunderstood.
First, a small comment. Even though there might be only a few debian
packages that requires java 8, there are still a lot of projects, both
amateur and professional that still use java 8 and will use it for many
years to come. So it would probably be missed if removed too early.
To the main point:
Long story short: the current scala package in debian depends on the
wrong version of java so it does not allways work correctly.
The current scala package contains scala 2.11, which is compatible with
java 6, but it depends on the java 8 package, so its not really well
supported.
That is, the scala project built and tested scala 2.11 using java 6.
The current Scala release, 2.12, requires java 8 to work correctly.
I have suggested this, in an email to the pkg-java list and have offered
to help resolve these issues, as I want to help provide a painless and
fuller scala development environment for both debian and ubuntu.
But that means jdk 8 must be available in some form in the release.
NB: its not just the java language version, but also the jdk classes
that are important for correct working of scala. So that means it must
actually be the jdk-v8 that has to be available, not just jdk11 with
java8 interpretation.
Regards
Thomas
