JDK/JRE profiles

[twogee]

Now that Oracle has ended public support for Java 5 and 6, shouldn't one add Java 7 profiles?

And, while we are at that, current JDK/JRE profiles are apparently based on old Linux releases.

Shouldn't profiles be based on a superposition of classes in the latest available public JDK/JRE release for Windows and Linux?

(OK, one may take Solaris and MacOS for completeness, but I guess these do not diverge that much.)

[jesper.pedersen]

Ideally, there should be a profile for the standard Java 7 API, and then profiles for each of the implementations with their classes. Of course extending the Java 7 profile.

[twogee]

The problem is that there are slight differences between every update of JRE/JDK (e.g. 12 classes were removed and 47 classes were added in rt.jar between 7u21 and 7u25).

You risk ending up with as many profiles as there are updates.

The difference between Windows and U*X in Java 7 rt.jar is about 1200 classes (900 for GUI - AWT/Swing/font/2D, 200 for IO - filesystem stuff, the rest for the differences in process/network/security implementation).

The difference between U*X'es is minimal, mostly security details and differences in process implementation.

One may perhaps create a "standard API" profile, a "generic internal API" profile and a "platform-specific internal API" profile (a use of which would perhaps set ReportStatus to ABOMINABLE)?

[jesper.pedersen]

The important stuff are the java. and the javax. stuff. The rest can be bundled in their own profile which extends the JDK7 one.

And I wouldn't worry too much about changes between patch releases - creating a profile based on the latest available release is good enough IMHO.