Re: The future of older Wicket 6.x and 7.x branches

[andrea del bene <an...@gmail.com>]

On 30/10/2015 15:51, Martijn Dashorst wrote:
> While it is just recently that we released Wicket 7 requiring Java7,
> the Java eco system is moving along faster than our release schedule
> can keep up with.
>
> I'm sure I won't be able to actually build Wicket 6.x releases next
> year due to Java 6 not being available (OS X 10.11 removed the Java 6
> installation I had on my box, I was able to re-install it). It was
> damn hard to build it now, thanks to Maven requiring Java 7, and the
> need for us to use Java 6 to compile and link the wicket jars.
>
> Wicket 7 will be similarly hard to build soon because of the JavaDoc
> mess Oracle inflicted on us in Java 8, and Java 7 being no longer
> publicly available with security updates and such.
>
> IMO this forces our hand to move quicker with upgrading our minimum
> required Java version and perhaps even consider that upgrading the
> minimum Java version is not a semver violation.
>
> WDYT?
>
> Martijn
The real problem is that Wicket lives in the JEE ecosystem and it can be 
quite misleading (if not harmful) changing the minimum Java required for 
a new minor release. One possible solution could be using Docker images 
with the required version of Java (https://github.com/dockerfile/java).