And we’re talking about Neon which releases in a year. When Java 8
will be two years old.
Valid point, Doug. It gives me a
little relief from me concerns, but doesn't totally eliminate them.
There are pretty easy workarounds for those users who can’t upgrade
their Java yet somehow found a way to install Eclipse on their
machines. The embedded jre in the Eclipse directory still works.
You'd think we're dealing with a
user base, being primarily developers, who could easily deal with such
workarounds. But time has shown that assumption isn't as reliable as one
might think. One problem is that Oracle makes a portable
(non-installer) JDK harder and harder to obtain. Eclipse itself doesn't
need a typical Windows installer, but JDK does.
Eric
Doug.
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Hi Eric, In
this context I think we should look at the current user base. Marcel
(cc) recently gave same real data about the current user base of Mars.
@Marcel, please feel free to provide better numbers, but IIRC approx.
75% of the error reporters using Eclipse Mars are using already Java 8.
Best
regards, Lars
I'm not an EPP package
maintainer or committer, but I'd like to provide some user-community
perspective on this.
Java 8 is just over 1 year old, and it's well known that many people and
(especially) corporations are slow to adopt new versions. If Eclipse
packages were to require Java 8, I can pretty much guarantee, based on
many years' experience supporting the community, that there will be many
complaints and confused users. In fact, in a corporate environment
where users literally can not update their own workstations, I'd say
it's highly likely that users would be unable to use Neon, or at least
have to jump through corporate IT hoops to get it working.
I'm not knocking Java 8 (at least not here), I'm just trying to keep
everyone focused on the users. Just because we, as tool developers, are
enamored and in love with the latest toys doesn't mean we can justify
pushing them down the throats of our large user base.
Eric
Hi,
I noticed
yesterday that m2e moved to Java 8, which triggered this request. I
contacted Markus Knauer and he suggested that I should send an email
to this list to trigger the discussion about BREE for the EPP's in
Neon.
I personally think it would be great to require Java 8 as
BREE for the EPP out of the following reasons:
- Java 7 is out
of public maintenance - if the EPP's decide early that they will
require Java 8, other project will have the option to improve their
code base based on Java 8 - if m2e requires Java 8, AFAIK this
would bump the most important EPP's also to Java 8.
In
Platform UI I would also like to support the Java 8 Date and Time API
via Databinding, which would also bump platform to Java 8. This is not
yet implement but on our roadmap. AFAIK the Jetty webserver also requires
Java 8, which would result in a bump in the Eclipse Help system to
Java 8.
Best regards, Lars
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