Re: [gentoo-java] Re: Deprecating JDK 1.4

[Petteri Räty]

Krzysiek Pawlik kirjoitti:
> Jörg Schaible wrote:
>> Please note, that Sun is still supporting JDK 1.3 for *paying*
>> customers. It
>> will take years till Sun is completely dropping 1.4:
>>
>> http://www.sun.com/software/javaseforbusiness/support.jsp
>
> Yes, but the free Java world goes forward, plethora of projects use
> generics -
> and they require >= 1.5 (or any other feature of JDK 1.5).
>
>> Therefore I still have even 1.3 ebuilds on my local tree. And I had to
>> download and use the official ant binaries to run it with 1.3.
>> Dropping 1.4
>> means also that it is no longer possible to run Maven with its minimum
>> JDK
>> requirement.
>
> Yes, but VM which is running maven is not the same as VM for which the
> code is
> generated (note -source and -target options of javac).
>
>> In Gentoo all is about choice, but this seem not to apply for Java
>> development. For me it gets unusable.
>
> You're missing the point: the official tree (gentoo-x86) will require
>  >=1.5,
> *but*: if you install JDK 1.4 (or any other version) you can still use
> it for
> your own software (including maven, ant and so on).
>
> Also like I said - more and more things require 1.5, which means that
> all things
> depending on them also need to be >= 1.5. For example: new hessian
> requires >=
> 1.5, which means that mx4j needs also to be switched to 1.5, which means
> we have
> to switch anything depending on mx4j, and so on.
>

I don't think we will be removing 1.4 JDKs from the main tree before Sun 
EOLs them. Even after that I think we will be keeping them around in the 
Java overlay. The point here is that we will end our support for using 
1.4 as the system VM and build VM when Sun EOLs it.

Regards,
Petteri