Rudder

Java 8 was made available on March 2014. Oracle Java 7 is End Of Life since April last year, and most of the jvm ecosystem is switching toward Java 8 requirement.

That means that some of our dependencies are stopping to do updates, even security one, for JVM 7, or will be during the life cycle of Rudder 4.0.

Moreover, most production already switched to Java 8 a long time ago or are deploying new environment on it for security and performance reason.

Regarding distro support, we are in a good shape:

- for RPM based distro, we have the official Sun^WOracle rpms available. We also have open-jdk-1.8 for at least CentOS 6.7 and 7.x., and java-1_8_0-ibm for sles12sp1.
- for Debian 7, we have a backport and openJDK is available on Debian 8
- it is available for Ubuntu 16.04. For Ubuntu 14.04, we have a semi-official ppa: https://launchpad.net/~openjdk-r/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

Given all of that, we will require Java 8 for Rudder 4.0.

For that, we need to:

- update the dependencies, both in maven compilation target and in packages,
- update Rudder init scripts to check the new dependency,
- and of course, update documentation to explain what are the migration path and the implication.