Re: pgjdbc: Maven -> Gradle, Java 6 => 7, JUnit 4 => 5 - Mailing list pgsql-jdbc

Hi Vladimir,

* +-0 for Gradle, I don't have a strong opinion against it, but if you
think it would make it easier to maintain, its ok for me.

* +1 for drop Java 6 it's long dead now.
* +-0 for dropping Java 7, some companies are slow to move to newer
jvm versions (or are stuck on 7), but is a minor fraction that could
or should paid for support.
The reality is that even commercial JDBC drivers have long ago moved to Java 8+.

* +1 for JUnit 5

* -1 Kotlin, (let's not enter in this discussion...)

* Other -> supported versions of PostgreSQL, currently they are
supported since 8.2, released on December 5, 2006, and out of support
since December 5, 2011
that's almost 9 years supporting in the driver an unsupported version
of PostgreSQL or in other words almost 14 years of total support, I
would personally follow
a policy of Server EOL + 5 years of support (more or less 10 years for
a version), so following that would mean to drop support for 8.x, and
support (until this year) the
version 9.0 that reach EOL on October 8, 2015 (+5 years on October,
2020)... the truth is that there is not a lot of code dependent on
server version, but a smaller
removal/cleanup of code could improve maintenance and allow to have a
test matrix under control.

On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 9:39 PM Vladimir Sitnikov
<sitnikov.vladimir@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> It looks like its time to move forward and bump the dependencies and tools:
>
> * Maven->Gradle
>
> As you might know, pgjdbc is built via Maven since 2015.
> It made the development, test, and release steps simpler.
> It made source-based builds easier, so distributions like Fedora got up-to-date source-based pgjdbc builds.
>
> However, Maven has certain limitations which cause confusion and inconvenience.
> For instance, we had to split the code between pgjdbc and pgjdbc-parent-poms repositories, which made it hard to
updatedependencies.
 
>
> Gradle makes build scripts more powerful, and it makes it easier to maintain the build.
> For instance, with Gradle we no longer need parent-poms, the test output is way easier to understand.
>
> The PR is here: https://github.com/pgjdbc/pgjdbc/pull/1627
>
> The intention is to merge the PR soon, so please let me know if you find issues with it.
>
> Even though the build system switch should not be a user-visible change, it would simplify the development.
> I understand it might bring disruption to the workflows, however, I hope it won't be that bad.
>
> * Minimal Java: 6 ==> 7 or 8
>
> So far the minimal supported Java was Java 6. That is pgjdbc was buildable with JDK 1.6 (end of free public updates
in2013).
 
> I guess its time to drop Java 6, and bump it to 7 or 8.
>
> Is there a real need to support Java 7? What do you think if we require Java 8 and completely drop 6&7?
>
> * JUnit: 4 => 5
>
> JUnit5 makes it simpler to write certain test cases, however, it requires Java 1.8 for execution.
> So far I guess
>
> * Kotlin?
>
> * Other?
>
> Vladimir