> So why would anyone decide, much less how would one justify to a corporate overlord, to spend all the time and resources to refactor their code, upgrade libraries (assuming the libraries themselves upgrade), update build systems, perform extensive regression testing, and everything else, just for a version that would be EOL one year after what they just upgraded from?
The longer you delay upgrades, the bigger the delta, the more work it will be to update. Instead of doing two medium sized updates, one today and another one in 2030, you'll be doing a huge one in 2030. That might be a trade off you might be willing to make today, but you might regret it in 2029 when you're halfway through a multiyear migration project where all feature work is on hold.
Re:Python 2 Removed from Debian
by erik_seaberg on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @03:49AM
(#34229332)
Most Java versions are good about backcompat, almost all the pain comes with Java 9 actually enforcing boundaries and breaking things that had merely been discouraged before (in the name of JDK modularization, which we otherwise aren’t interested in).
For Java 8 especially, the later reason is particularly amusing, as Oracle's extended support is now slated to go to 2030 (16yrs after release, for comparison Py2.7 got 10yrs), but Java 21, the next Java LTS that should release next year, will be on Oracle's standard 8 year extended support cycle, and thus extended support only goes til 2031. So why would anyone decide, much less how would one justify to a corporate overlord, to spend all the time and resources to refactor their code, upgrade libraries (assuming the libraries themselves upgrade), update build systems, perform extensive regression testing, and everything else, just for a version that would be EOL one year after what they just upgraded from?