Re: [JAVA] JDK Support Policy?

[Bryan Cutler <cu...@gmail.com>]

Thanks for bringing this up Micah. Given that we have finite resources for
CI, I think the oldest active LTS version sounds pretty reasonable.
Ultimately it should be community driven and balance between the available
resources we have and peoples time to patch any issues that come up.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 1:09 PM David Li <li...@apache.org> wrote:

> Hey Micah,
>
> Looks like this hasn't gotten much attention, unfortunately. If Spark
> wants to support JDK8 for a while longer, since Spark is an important user
> of Arrow, we might also want/need to support JDK8, unless they're OK with
> using an older version of Arrow, or targeting different Arrow versions for
> different JDK versions? (Not sure if that is customary or reasonable, but
> as I understand it, Spark doesn't use too much of the Arrow APIs - so it
> might be workable?) Either way that would need support from maintainers and
> CI.
>
> -David
>
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2022, at 13:02, Micah Kornfield wrote:
> > I don't think we've ever discussed a formal policy on which JDK versions
> we
> > intend to support in Java.
> >
> > JDK8 is ending active support this month (but still has premium/security
> > support available).  Spark seems like it will continue to support JDK8
> > through its 3.x versions which are still under active development.
> >
> > As a data point I think Python generally tries to be compatible with
> > versions that aren't end of life (and at least some other big projects
> that
> > depend on Arrow also follow this policy.).
> >
> > To a large extent this will boil down to contributors willing to set up
> and
> > maintain the necessary CI infrastructure to ensure that Arrow is working
> on
> > all the existing JDKs.
> >
> > My opinion is we should at least support the oldest LTS version that has
> > active support but would like to hear others' thoughts.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Micah
>