Bug#906785: version warping patch is overly aggressive

[Bdale Garbee]

Markus Koschany <apo at debian.org> writes:

> we all assumed that OpenJDK 11 will remove support for source/target
> 1.6. After a discussion on the OpenJDK mailing list they decided to
> postpone this change for OpenJDK 12. [1]

Aha, that helps explain things.  Thanks.

> The current patch simplifies our packaging work because we don't have to
> manually fix packages that still target older Java releases. Since we
> don't support and ship Java 6 in Debian anymore, there is no downside
> for our users because all packages work for them with OpenJDK8 or
> OpenJDK 11. Frankly we have never supported your MacOS use case.
> Security support for OpenJDK 6 has ended a long time ago.

While I understand both points, as we talked about at Debconf 18, it has
been massively useful to us that we can continue to support customers
who insist on using inferior operating system platforms that stick them
with old Java versions.  If we can retain the ability to build
installers that work with Java 6 for a while longer that's great for us,
means Debian's Java build tools aren't breaking backward compatibility
earlier than necessary, and I see no actual downside for Debian.

>> Frankly, I'm not sure having this patch in the Debian package at all is a 
>> good idea.
>
> I think the patch could be removed for OpenJDK 11 but should be applied
> for OpenJDK 12 again. All build tools already emit a deprecation warning
> for source/target 1.6, so developers and users should be aware of it,
> and it is certain now that OpenJDK 11 will be the last JDK that supports
> 1.6.

Ok.  While I personally continue to be concerned that the version
warping in ant isn't a great idea generally, I understand the
motivation behind it.

I'll personally be happy if ant doesn't enforce version warping more
restrictive than the underlying javac requires.  In particular, if it
allows us to continue to target Java 6 compatibility for the life of
OpenJDK 11 in Debian, which I think would give us through the life of
the Buster release cycle since as I think the plan is to ship 11 as the
default-jdk for Buster? 

Bdale
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