Now that 2.13.0 is pushed out I would like to focus again on 3.0. The primary driver was to make it “compatible” with JPMS, i.e. properly define each of the jars as a Java module. Some of our dependencies, like Jackson, have implemented support so that we can now properly reference them, which is one of the main reasons I believe things have been moving slow.
Now that we have moved the 2.x releases to Java 8 I am wondering if we shouldn’t make Java 11 the minimum for 3.0. It would simplify the build as we would no longer need multiple Java versions installed, we would no longer need toolchains, and we could simply move the code from the Java 9 specific modules into their respective modules and clean up that code. It would also make it much easier to implement a few other features that require Java 9+. Obviously, if we have a minimum of Java 11 then we would need to continue to support both the main and release-2.x branches for some time to come as it is going to be quite a while before Java 8 falls out of favor. Thoughts? Ralph
