I'm fine with dropping 1.6 when 1.9 is out, but why not simply looking at last month's JRE6-variant download numbers of the PGJDBC download host? It should clearly tell us if the number is in any kind statistically relevant.
BTW, we're maintaining software on 12.000+ machines running at 1.200+ enterprises worldwide. We switched ALL of them from Java 6 to Java 7 last year (even Oracle did remote auto-removes of Java 6, remember?). Nobody complained. No, sorry. A lot of them complained: They wanted to go directly to Java 8! These are real-world numbers taken from an industrial vendor. Just to give some statistical facts. :-)
-Markus
From: pgsql-jdbc-owner@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-jdbc-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Dave Cramer
Sent: Donnerstag, 18. Juni 2015 20:33
To: Vladimir Sitnikov
Cc: Christopher BROWN; List
Subject: Re: [JDBC] Pre-processing during build
Vladimir,
To be honest I don't really know. The difficult part about this is that we could put up a survey and ask "what version of JVM do you use" I suspect that 1.8 will be overwhelmingly popular. The problem is the subset of people responding may not be representative of the population that is using it. From my experience working with bigger companies they view JDBC as a simple tool. The metaphor that comes to mind is a car with aftermarket wheels. You can't get any more for the car because you spend 2000 on the wheels. Cars come with wheels; similarly PostgreSQL comes with a JDBC driver. It occurs to me that maven actually exacerbates this as you don't even have to come to the site to get the driver now that you can just add the dependency to your pom and it will be automagically downloaded for you.
While writing this I am thinking that we might get away with saying we are only going to support 3 JVM versions so currently 1.6-1.8, once 1.9 comes out we can drop 1.6, however at the moment this is just a thought, not a policy. Thoughts ?
On 18 June 2015 at 11:18, Vladimir Sitnikov <sitnikov.vladimir@gmail.com> wrote:
>Removing JDK 1.6 is not being contemplated at the moment
When do you think it is safe to remove JDK 1.6 support?
Vladimir