In the next few months, Jenkins will require Java 8 as its runtime.
Back in last November.
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.