On 31 October 2014 08:18, Max Rydahl Andersen <manderse@redhat.com> wrote:

Fedora 20 used to have 3 different Java versions (5, 7, 8).

ok, why no Java 6 ?

Besides many technical reason the biggest one is non-technical in my eyes - no one volunteered to do it. You know it's always a matter of "who will do the work?". I'm pretty sure that if someone jumps in and say "Hey, I'll maintain Java 6, fix problems/adopt Java 6 to changes in the OS if neeeded, help strengthen the switching between JREs, go through the Java projects(shipped in Fedora) and help them properly set their targets in build scripts so builds properly work on Java 6 and etc" there will be no objection to having Java 6. :)

Fair enough.

OpenJDK 7
was removed from F21 because its support will end before F21 EOL and
we
don't want to ship software not supported by upstream.

So for users most stable thing is to use Oracle JDK builds instead which
are and will stay available ?

Users can still try to use it but it's something that they have to do on their own - download, extract, set PATH, etc. Just like on every platform with Oracle JVM.

Yeah, this is similar experience for developers on all other platforms so its expected/assumed.

No separate repo with "binaries that is currently supported but will not
stay supported for all of fedora 21 lifetime" ?

1. Fedora can not legally redistribute Oracle JDK.

I know - hence why I would think having a openjdk 7 build would make sense.

2. Fedora can not distribute something that Fedora developers can not support if there is a problem in it (as it is with Oracle JDK).

so *any* package that is known to be marked as EOL sometime in the future before the upcoming Fedora EOL's gets removed from that future Fedora release ? Even that Java 7 is still the most used and targeted Java version ?


Maybe I misunderstand the use-case, but your projects can still target Java 7 even if Eclipse is running on Java 8.


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