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From: Hugo Trippaers <hugo@trippaers.nl>
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Subject: [DISCUSS] Java 7, tomcat 7 and further upgrades
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Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 15:36:31 -0700
To: dev@cloudstack.apache.org
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Hey everyone,

Back in February 2013 Oracle announced the end of public support for =
java 1.6 already. Today we are still using java 1.6 as our supported =
platform. I've been looking at the next generation of linux =
distributions (well mainly at Fedora 18, which will probably become RHEL =
7) and those platforms ship with java 1.7 by default. =20

Next to that several core components are also upgraded with affect our =
installation. RHEL 7 will most likely use tomcat 7 as the default tomcat =
platform for example.

If we want to start shipping for those platform we will have to start =
testing with these versions of the software as well. I'm already working =
on some things that need to be done, like replacing the existing init =
scripts with systemd versions and adapting the spec file for the new OS, =
but there is more to it than that.

I'm wondering what we need to do on the source side of things. My =
proposal would be to at least configure maven to set the source version =
to 1.7. This requires developers to use the java 7 versions of the jdk. =
We can leave the target to 1.6 for the time being to ensure that the =
packages could still run on a 1.6 jdk.

However at a certain point we should start to advice people to run =
CloudStack on java 1.7 as there are no more public security updates to =
java 1.6.

So summarized proposal, make 4.2 the last version to support 1.6 and =
switch maven source version to 1.7 after we cut the release branch for =
4.2. The new reference platform for the next release would be jdk 1.7 =
and tomcat7 (meaning packaging will be tested on those platforms).=20

So what do you all think of this? If we are ok to do this i would like =
to start with this right after the release branch cut. This constitutes =
a major architecture change so i would want this to be in as early as =
possible in the release cycle.

And as a side note, are there any other version updates we would like to =
see in that release. We depend on several ancient libraries if i'm =
looking through the pom files. Maybe we should consider upgrading a few =
dependencies to more recent versions?

Cheers,

Hugo