Re: Proposal about deprecation and removal

[Benoit TELLIER <bt...@apache.org>]

Hi,

Just wanted sharing my developer experience today, that is so well 
summarized below...

So, after 
https://www.mail-archive.com/server-user@james.apache.org/msg16880.html 
discussion on the mailing list it seems that there is a consensus to 
upgrade to Java 21 (yey!).

I decided to start POCing around this task: 
https://github.com/apache/james-project/pull/1833

Along the way I found that some dependencies needed to be updated, like 
JPA in order to support new class formats. CF 
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OPENJPA-2918. Which I did...

To finally found out that our  way outdated spring implementation uses 
spring-orm to provide OpenJPA bindings...

And the sentence "this would break Spring" came again. And once again 
this "legacy" makes making progress needlessly painful.

Regards,

Benoit TELLIER

On 24/11/2023 17:30, Matthieu Baechler wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I had a hack session with Benoit today and the sentence "this would break Spring" came many times along the day.
>
> As I'm less active on James than I used to be, I must admin I have no idea how popular the Spring version of James is nowadays.
>
> However, what strikes me when I hack on James is how the size of the project and its legacy makes it so slow to make progress.
>
> We did some deprecation and removal in the past but we have been conservative about that.
>
> I would like to argue that being conservative to preserve existing users may actually prevents from attracting new ones. Moreover, it probably also prevents new developers to involve as they are quickly overwhelmed.
>
> So, what would you think about removing more aggressively features and modules, starting with the Spring support?
>
> Cheers,
>
> -- Matthieu Baechler

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