Posted by gouessej on Feb 05, 2020; 11:35am
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/JogAmp-Jbeil-RC-Build-2-4-0-rc-20200202-tp4040323p4040331.html

Java3D <= 1.5 is none of our concerns and the problem you mentioned has several not very satisfying workaround but it doesn't require Java 7 for sure, numerous updates of Java 8 still support this configuration.

When people choose to buy Apple hardware, they have to face the consequences, it's not the kind of software designed to last, you shouldn't rely on the Java Runtime Environment installed on the system anyway, those Java3D programs should embed a JRE and sorry to repeat that but Java3D <= 1.5 is none of our concerns. Dropping Java 7 support in JOGL will force those programs to embed a more recent JRE, it's not very hard. Apple Java 6 is deprecated by Apple itself, it shouldn't be used. I'm not sure that JOGL still works on Mac OS X 10.6, it's terribly old.

In my humble opinion, as any program can embed its own JRE, as less and less people keep a JRE installed on the system, it doesn't make a lot of sense to support deprecated versions of Java and supporting at least the two latest LTS versions of Java is a good compromise. Moreover, it will become more and more complicated to support more than one LTS version because of some changes in Java. JogAmp shouldn't be constrained by debatable deployment strategies including the use of broken and unmaintained or mostly abandoned tools.

Dropping the support of some hardware doesn't make me laugh but it's not really what is going to happen, OpenJDK 8 works on Apple Mac Book Pro manufactured in 2007 as far as I remember, I don't see where those users forced to use Apple Java are especially when the concerned program embeds its own JRE.