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Jenkins Upgrades To Java 8

Baptiste Mathus
Baptiste Mathus January 17, 2017

In the next few months, Jenkins will require Java 8 as its runtime.

Back in last November, we discussed interesting statistics showing that Jenkins was now running Java 8 on a majority of its running instances.

Timeline

Here is how we plan to roll that baseline upgrade in the next few months.

  • Now: Announce the intention publicly.

  • April, 2017: Drop support for Java 7 in Jenkins weekly. With the current rhythm, that means 2.52 will most likely be the first weekly to require Java 8.

  • June 2017: First LTS version requiring Java 8 is published. This should be something around 2.60.1.

If you are still running Java 7, you will not be able to upgrade to the latest LTS version after some date probably around May 2017.

Why Upgrade to Java 8

Balancing those numbers with many other criteria:

  • Java 7 has been now end-of-lifed for 18+ months

  • People are already moving away from Java 7, as show the numbers

    • 52.8% of instances were already running Java 8 back in last November, and now reaching 58% two months later.

    • If we only look at Jenkins 2.x, then we reach 72%.

  • Java 8 runtime is known from the field to be more stable

  • Many developers have been wanting to be allowed to leverage the improvements that Java 8 provides to the language and platform (lambdas, Date/Time API…​ just to name a few). Being also a developer community, we want Jenkins to be appealing to contributors.

If you have questions or feedback about this announcement, please feel free to post it to the Jenkins developers mailing list.

About the author

Baptiste Mathus

Baptiste Mathus

Baptiste has been using and contributing to Jenkins since it was called differently, and is a huge proponent of the Agile, Devops & Continuous Delivery movements. He loves to discuss not only the technical aspects, but also the even more essential cultural aspects of this all, working together to improve the value provided to customers in a great inclusive and blameless environment.