[hibernate-dev] Should we support out of date non-LTS Java versions?

[Sanne Grinovero]

Hi all,

I just tested if we still need the dependency to
'javax.activation:javax.activation-api:1.2.0' from Hibernate ORM /
master, as I was suspecting the original reasons to add it might be
out of date.

I guessed almost right, as it turns out we don't need this dependency
for Java 11, nor it was ever needed for Java 8 either: it was
introduced to solve a specific Java 9 compatibility issue.

I verified it's still needed for Java 9 compatibility. Personally that
makes me think I'd rather remove the dependency, people should no
longer use Java 9;

Java 9 has been "out of support" since a while now: I expect people to
either be on the latest stable release Java 11 - or on the previous
stable release aka Java 8 (others might be toying with 12 and/or 13
but that's not relevant).

Clearly since we have no more 5.x minor releases planned, I'm thinking
of dropping a JVM version in a micro (!) - but considering this is an
unsupported non-LTS JVM I'm not considering this to be an outrageous
idea as we'd normally treat such a suggestion.

Please don't take this as nitpicking about removing a single
dependecy: that's easy enough for people to ignore and workaround by
re-adding it explicitly; it's more important to focus on us creating a
clear policy for the future.

Can we establish how we'll treat support for any other future
non-Long-Term-Support JVM version?

Next time we might have a more tricky issue, and I think we should
make our intentions and policy clear so to have freedom to drop
support for experimental Java releases as we see fit, provided they
are out of date.

I couldn't test JDK 10 - but that doesn't matter as the details of
this specific issue are irrelevant to the main point of agreeing on a
general policy.

Comments?

Thanks,
Sanne