Hi Ron, > Is it not possible to run Maven in a JRE7 VM and compile code with a > 1.3 compiler?
If you have a JRE7 VM available, then sure. If JRE7 is not available for your platform, then it must remain possible to run Maven with an older JRE, or else no more Maven for you. I do not know enough about Maven internals to know if it would be feasible to increase the default source/target version to 1.7 while keeping Maven core itself compatible with 1.5, though. >From Jochen & Stephen's exchange, it sounds like maybe not. If so, then my vote is for Maven core to remain compatible with Java 1.5, as Stephen suggested. > What keeps people on old versions for over 8 years(1.5)? One reason is old hardware. For example, if you have a Mac PowerPC, you are stuck on OS X 10.5 "Leopard", which will never run Java 7. Another reason is old software. If you run OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", you are stuck with Java 6, since the OpenJDK7 and Oracle JDK 7 projects decided to require 10.7 "Lion" or newer. This might be OK if upgrading were free, and/or if Lion were strictly an "upgrade", but it actually removes functionality (e.g., Rosetta). When deciding whether to start requiring Java 6 for some of our OSS projects, we took at look at our usage statistics, and found that (as of ~1 year ago) more than 10% of our total user base ran OS X 10.5 or earlier. So we decided to wait a bit longer. Regards, Curtis
