On 1 November 2014 18:09, Christopher <ctubbsii-fedora@apache.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 11:41 AM, Aleksandar Kurtakov <akurtako@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> > From: "Christopher" <ctubbsii-fedora@apache.org>
>> > To: "Sudhir Khanger" <ml@sudhirkhanger.com>
>> > Cc: "Fedora Java Development List" <java-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org>
>> > Sent: Saturday, November 1, 2014 6:43:17 AM
>> > Subject: Re: [fedora-java] Eclipse Luna on Fedora 21 and JDK 8 requirement
>> >
>> > On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Sudhir Khanger < ml@sudhirkhanger.com >
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 5:06 AM, Christopher < ctubbsii-fedora@apache.org >
>> > wrote:
>> > > to warrant the pursuit of -target 1.7 in its build
>> >
>> > Would it have caused technical problems to have included both 1.7 or
>> > 1.8 as targets?
>> >
>> >
>> > Either I'm not understanding you, or you're not understanding the problem.
>> > F21 could have built as -target 1.7 and run on the provided Java 8 JVM, but
>> > also could have run under a user-specified Java 7 JVM (assuming there
>> > weren't any bootstrap classpath problems that would have prevented such a
>> > build, which there are... but it may not matter for Eclipse and its
>> > dependencies). I can't imagine there would be any reason to build Eclipse
>> > for both, unless Eclipse itself has some internal restriction that prevents
>> > it from building projects using Java 8, when itself was built with Java 7.
>> > The fact that there isn't a 1.7 JDK to build against properly, to address
>> > the bootstrap classpath problem, is not a technical problem, so much as a
>> > policy that prevented OpenJDK7 from being packaged alongside OpenJDK8 in
>> > F21.
>>
>> Well, it's neither technical nor policy problem - it's resources problem. There is no policy stating that there can be only OpenJDK8. As soon as people join in with the ongoing maintenance of both upstream and downstream OpenJDK 7 the problem would be solved.
>>
> The explanation I've seen multiple times now is that there was a decision to explicitly exclude OpenJDK7 from F21, because Oracle has Java 7 scheduled for EOL during the window of time where F21 is expected to be supported. That sounds very much like policy.

That is sounds like policy is purely co-incidental. There really is no-one stepping up to maintain it or backport security fixes after Java 7 is EOL.

--
Mat Booth
http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora