considering that java 5.0 (aka 1.5.x) is stable and used... can't you add 1.4 and 1.5 (so unmasked..) simply slotted? it will let people to sligthly move to 1.5 without having hard packages compilation errors. is the slot a problem ?
it's already slotted as 1.5. that doesnt change the problem that if somebody uses as it's system vm some packages dont compile. example: somebody decides to use the 1.5 jdk as the system vm at some point, everything works fine for him and he merges java packages over , lets say 3 or 4 weeks. then he has to compile dom4j or other bigger packages which dont work with the 1.5 jdk yet, then he cant simply switch back without recompiling all packages which he has merged using a 1.5 jdk. we're working on it but it is still not finished.
sure...but the 1.4 will only be a "support" for 1.5 packages that don't compile. 1.4 compiled -> 1.5 runtime is possibile. another possibility is providing some -bin packages....java doesn't need to be compiled on every machine. this can be a nice and fast solution for 1.5-not-compiling-but-blocking apps. for example i can't compile jaxen 1.0, dependency of tomcat. please consider that
