[Biojava-l] Increasing Java version requirement for BioJava

[Jose Duarte]

The lack of a Java 8 package in the standard repositories for Ubuntu
14.04LTS is definitely a big argument against 1.8. Andreas plan of doing
1.7 for next release and 1.8 for the one after sounds like a great
compromise. The next Ubuntu LTS will come in April with Java 8 packages, so
that will be a good timing for our move to 1.8 in the over-next release.

Jose

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 10:45 AM, Jan Stourac <xstourac at gmail.com> wrote:

> We are using Java 8 (because it is requirement of one library) in almost
> all our projects, so I am fine with both 7 and 8.
>
> But even though I agree with the plan of upgrading, I would like also to
> note the importance of checking java/openjdk packages available in the
> repositories of popular distros... For example Debian 8 (current stable) or
> Ubuntu 14.04 LTS still do not have Java 8 in standard repositories and it's
> a hard question what is better version to force - Java 7 with no updates
> from Oracle (but I think that RedHat still take care of OpenJDK 7) or Java
> 8 with lack of support from some disto maintainers?
>
> Cheers,
> Jan.
>
>
> On 01/12/2016 01:16 PM, Spencer Bliven wrote:
>
> There has been some informal discussion of increasing the Java version
> requirement for BioJava from the current Java 6 to either 7 or 8. It would
> be great to hear from the larger BioJava community about whether this would
> be a welcome change or not.
>
> I will start the discussion by listing what I see as the pros and cons of
> setting each version as the minimum requirement for BioJava.
>
> Java 6:
> ---------
> + Greatest backwards compatibility
> - No updates since Feb 2013
> <http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html>*
> - Some dependencies are not compatible, requiring the use of older
> versions (currently only log4j, but could be others in the future)
>
> Java 7:
> ---------
> + Most popular
> <https://plumbr.eu/blog/java/java-version-statistics-2015-edition>
> version currently
> + Some minor language features added
> - No updates since Apr 2015
> <http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html>*
>
> Java 8:
> ---------
> + Tons of awesome new programming features, e.g. lambda functions
> + Only version supported by Oracle
> - Not available for many systems
>
> * Note that all versions are backwards compatible, so you can always use a
> more up-to-date JDK for downstream projects. Running outdated software is
> generally a bad idea, so users are encouraged to use the Java 8 JRE,
> regardless of the minimum BioJava requirement.
>
>
> One thing I would like to get a sense of is how many BioJava users are
> still using 6 and 7. @*emckee2006* mentioned on github
> <https://github.com/biojava/biojava/issues/364#issuecomment-170710242>
> that they still have some servers on 6. I know that getting Java 8
> installed on CentOS is rather painful, so probably some users haven't yet
> updated to 8.
>
> Let me know if I missed anything!
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Spencer
>
>
>
>
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