On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 5:52 PM Mark Thomas <ma...@apache.org> wrote: > > All, > > We have discussed plans for extended Tomcat 9 support several times. It > is still probably a couple of years away but I thought it would be worth > starting the discussion again. > > There are a wide range of options. This is a brain dump of the questions > I have been mulling over when considering options. > > 1. Extended support requires back-porting of security fixes. What else > do we want to back-port. Bug fixes? New features?
I would keep the current backport policy, so backport most. > 2. Do we want to continue to support the APR connector? If we decide no, > we can also stop supporting Tomcat Native 1.x. Equally, if we keep APR > we'll need to keep making Native 1.x releases to pick up OpenSSL updates. Keeping it is certainly a high cost ... > 3. What minimum version of Java do we want to support? Stick with Java > 8? Increase the minimum version in line with availability of free > supported JREs (e.g. from Temurin)? Something else? I would stick with Java 8 rather than ever try bumping. Bumping Java could be very hard for apps and their libraries. Realistically we would have to move to 21 minimum all of a sudden, so this would hurt a lot. Java 8 remains supported until the end of 2026 (and 2030 for extended support versions). It would therefore seem ok to me to keep in mind those dates for the Tomcat 9.0 support. I volunteer to keep on RMing Tomcat 9.0 :D (and make the releases as long as I have enough votes obviously) > 4. Do we cancel plans for extended Tomcat 9 support? (I'm not a fan of > this.) I would say no. > 5. Do we effectively just continue with 9.0.x or create 9.?.x? I would continue with 9.0 for now (see below). > 6. Do we continue from 9.0.x or do we start from 10.1.x and revert the > Jakarta EE API changes? I would not do that, there's still not much benefit to it. > I suspect the folks that want extended 9.0.x support also want minimal > changes. If we do plan on changing things (minimum Java version, > dropping APR) we should provide plenty of notice. Right now I would say upgrading Java is a bad move, we might as well EOL Tomcat 9.0. As a compromise to maintainability, there's a rationale for dropping THE problematic feature (the APR connector and tomcat-native 1.x). That would justify doing a 9.1 without any other changes, which would be that "extended support version". > When do we think extended support will start? My best guess is no > earlier than 31 March 2027. It could start when Java 8 is EOL in Temurin (Red Hat has the same date too), so end of 2026 ? Rémy > Thoughts? > > Mark > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@tomcat.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@tomcat.apache.org
