[josm-dev] Switch to Java 6?

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Sat, 28 Nov 2009, David Earl wrote:

>> now that stats show that only about 4% of all josm users use still Java
>> 1.5 and we have some problems which cannot be solved in a nice way with
>> this version we may think about switching to Java 6.
>>
>> So the questions is:
>> Do we want to switch to Java 6 after the next tested release has been
>> published? Pro? Contra?
>
> Won't this completely kill some Mac users? I believe Snow Leopard (10.6)
> has finally reached Java 6, but Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (which is still
> widely used) doesn't have a Java 6 release at all. And it's no good
> saying "upgrade to 10.6" because Mac Minis and other machines only have
> 0.5GB memory and the base for 10.6 is 1GB, so upgrades on really very
> recent hardware are virtually impossible.

As long as no update-forcing API changes are done, they still can use the 
upcomming tested version. We would add a "last java 5" link on josm page 
and so on. It's only these users would not get any new stuff. There are 
more people using JOSM version below 2000 than people using Java 1.5.

And when we look at the features, then current JOSM is already well done. 
I think JOSM is still the leading editor in OSM world. :-)

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)