Closed MikeMatrix closed 11 years ago
As I experienced, many people are still using java 6.
As far as I know "many" is not a valid term in terms of statistics. We can't really decide on something like "many".
Mhm... to be quite honest, I wouldn't switch to Java 7 until Java 8 arrives... at least if Java 7 has no super smart features that are absolutely required. The simple reason is that I would want to keep backward compatibility as long as possible and, as BlockCat said, a lot of people (including me) are still using Java 6 as their main runtime environment. Another option would be to offer a Java 7 and Java 6 version (put the J7 version on all the official sources and offer the J6 one as some kind of compatibility/legacy version). We could also take this one step further and implement a version check into VoxelUpdate so it will always grab a fitting version of a plugin.
To me, that sounds more like unnecessary work, I think for the time being stick with Java 6, but by all means gather the stats and see if it's worth it, can't exactly hurt.
Java 7 still has some features that would make the life of mine pretty much easier (especially when talking of upcoming Major releases). I know that many people still have Java 6 running. The interesting thing would be, how many SERVERS (because we are talking servers) are still running it. And for example Tekkit (which is pretty popular these days) can only run on Java 7. So this would be useful to know. The extra work is given anyway, since we are redoing a lot of code currently. Stuff like Project Coin just makes life easier, and would reduce changes to be made towards Java 8 later on.
The original release of TacticalBacon used 7 and we happened to be about the only server of many that had 7/was able to use it.
You could make a metric but this is assuming all server owners are running the latest build, which most aren't from the majority of sniper servers I've been on.
Might be a good idea to gather some java version information, so we can estimate when we can change to Java 7. Hidendra said he would include a feature like this in a future version of metrics, but as for now he will wait for the next minecraft release to gather from a wider spectrum more quickly.