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.

-- 
Krzysiek Pawlik   <nelchael at gentoo.org>   key id: 0xBC555551
desktop-misc, java, apache, ppc, vim, kernel, python...