Re: Pre-processing during build

Dave,

please remind that we're talking about JDK6 to drop, which was publicly EOL'ed two years ago, will end Oracle's "premier" support this year, end even end Oracle's "extended" support in two and a half years! Even Debian and zOS come with newer JREs. So actually I'd really love to see a public statistics on how many actively maintained JDBC applications CANNOT migrate easily to JRE 7 at least! Do you have any statistics available? :-)

-Markus

From: pgsql-jdbc-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-jdbc-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Dave Cramer
Sent: Donnerstag, 18. Juni 2015 17:11
To: Christopher BROWN
Cc: List
Subject: Re: [JDBC] Pre-processing during build

Dave Cramer

dave.cramer(at)credativ(dot)ca
http://www.credativ.ca

On 18 June 2015 at 10:56, Christopher BROWN <brown(at)reflexe(dot)fr> wrote:

If you decided to drop JDK6 support going forward, that wouldn't cause the current JDK6-compatible PostgreSQL driver versions to be deleted, so no-one would be stuck. Even if new features are added to PostgreSQL (the database or the driver), the JDK6 JDBC API will remain constant and won't have any more or less features than before; there's probably enough expressivity in SQL and driver-specific classes to do pretty much anything anyway.

These are just pros and cons to consider if you're thinking about this (I'm not recommending anything either way, especially as this tends to start flame wars). Personally, I wouldn't be shocked by such a choice given that PostgreSQL and the driver are open-source and that JDK6 has been EOL for a long time, and that as such, I understand there are limited resources for supporting all possible configurations.

Anyway, like I said, even if there was a 9.5 or 9.6 version that was JDK7+, JDK6 users will still be able to use the 9.4 driver.

On 18 June 2015 at 15:52, Vladimir Sitnikov <sitnikov(dot)vladimir(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> even with source/target set to 1.6, "javac" will complain that (for your pre-Java-8 drivers) you haven't implemented everything

I see.
This indeed makes "step-by-step" compilation a good solution.

We might want to drop JDK6 support to make it easier for us and for
the contributors (1 JDK less to install).

Vladimir

Removing JDK 1.6 is not being contemplated at the moment. While many "hackers" are keen to use the latest greatest features of Java N+1, there is a VERY large population that still runs older JVM's for whatever reason. As I mentioned earlier in this thread the focus of the driver is to provide access to the all supported versions of PostgreSQL( and even older when possible ) to Java users, not to provide the latest Java tools for PostgreSQL.