It would be interesting to see if there is any consensus among other Apache projects. This must be something many other projects are also encountering.
I found this message thread on the jdom group: http://www.jdom.org/pipermail/jdom-interest/2007-September/015907.html It reminded me that if we choose to be 1.4 compatible, we will eventually need to "upgrade" at some point in the future, and that would require additional effort. In addition, the generics and simplified loop syntax are improvements that increase readability and expressiveness of the code. Although this might not be overwhelming, in my opinion it is significant and should be considered. As someone who has been working with 1.5 for some time, it is always disappointing when I need to work with a library that lacks the 1.5 improvements. It would be disappointing as well to impose this disappointment onto users of our code. Plus, over time, we know that the balance will move increasingly towards 1.5 (which, technically, is itself outdated now). That said, I acknowledge I am not addressing the advantages of being 1.4 compatible. - Keith -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/-jira--Created%3A-%28TIKA-9%29-Make-source-code-compilable-on-Java-1.4-by-removing-Java-5-features-such-as-generics.-tf4418230.html#a12761937 Sent from the Apache Tika - Development mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
