deprecate Solaris/SunOS

[Brad Walker <bw...@musings.com>]

A few thoughts about JEP-362 & JEP 381:

JEP-362 - Deprecate the Solaris and SPARC Ports, marked as (Closed /
Delivered)
JEP 381 - Remove the Solaris and SPARC Ports, marked as Candidate (meaning
it's going to happen eventually)

These two JDK proposals are moving forward as much as it pains me to accept
this. I know people who are trying to keep this from happening. But, it's a
pretty steep cliff to climb. So as a former Sun engineer who actively
worked on the kernel and SPARC firmware, I have to accept this is going to
happen.

Having said that, this means the Solaris/SPARC, Solaris/x64, and
Linux/SPARC ports are effectively going to stop having Java run on those
platforms. And that means NO SUPPORT for Netbeans to run on these
platforms. I'm not sure that really matters as I can't see how anyone has
been running Netbeans on these platforms in the past few years.

Why do I say this? There is a lot of bit-rot taking place on the platform
due to these platforms. Netbeans does things like kick off a Mozilla
browser in various situations. Mozilla? Yes, Mozilla. The browser before
Firefox was created.. How long ago was that? A very long time. There are
places in Netbeans where we are tied to actual keystrokes from the keyboard
that no longer make sense.

So I'm going to submit some changes to clean up this code.

At the same time, it will make porting the CND code over because there is a
LOT of C/C++ platform specific code that just doesn't apply anymore and can
effectively be removed in whole.

As someone who has actually looked at this low-level code, hopefully that
makes sense.

-brad w.




On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 12:15 PM Jan Lahoda <la...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 7:08 PM Brad Walker <bw...@musings.com> wrote:
> >
> > It's definitely a lot of work but can probably be drastically improved
> > because of JEP-362 and JEP-381..
> >
>
> Not sure why that is a significant help. We still need proper parsing and
> editor features, and also debugger, on all other platforms.
>