We're still in agreement; I agree implementations should be able to chose to only support 21.
That seems compatible with also allowing an implementation to support 17 if they chose.
Well, not exactly in practice.
If I release "OmniFaces 5 for Jakarta EE 11", which takes advantage of JDK 21, then it's a simple message if Jakarta EE 11 baselined on JDK 21.
However, if JDK 17 implementations of Jakarta EE 11 also exist, I would have to market it as "OmniFaces 5 for those Jakarta EE 11 installations or implementations that run on JDK 21".
JDK 21 is then by definition a subset of the market, since we allow for JDK 17. There are probably customers going to complain, and we may have to revert to using JDK 17 anyway. If there simply was no Jakarta EE 11 on JDK 17, that simply would not be an issue for us.
Likewise, even though technically possible, if Bauke, me and co decide to make Mojarra JDK 21 only, and then Thomas, Volodymyr and co would decide the same, it would not be possible to have a single certified Jakarta EE Web or Full implementation on JDK 17. Of course, neither the Mojarra nor MyFaces committers would ever want to put EE in such a situation, so practically we're forced to resort to JDK 17 as the maximum JDK we can take advantage of.
Hope this makes it more clear what the issues are. (to be sure, repeating again what I stated elsewhere; I respect the majority decision to go with JDK 17 for EE 11)
Kind regards,
Arjan Tijms
