How long will we maintain JDK 1.6 compatibility?

[yurishkuro]

[tedsuo]

I would want to see us sit at a stable v1 before considering a 1.8+ API. In that sense, we maintain 1.6 compatibility "forever."

[jpkrohling]

I think we should really, really consider 1.8 as the baseline. As API providers, it would help us a lot to be able to have default implementations on interfaces. For instance, #282 would be a non-breaking change with a code like this on the SpanContext interface:

    default <T extends SpanContext> T unwrap() {
        return (T) this;
    }

[carlosalberto]

This issue came up during #326 and I would like to re-take this discussion on the reasons behind it (to decide the timeline to move to 1.7/1.8).

As a start, this old issue could throw light into the historical context: https://github.com/opentracing/opentracing-java/issues/75

To me, it sounds like the important bit here is to dig into any framework or service that would really need to keep support for 1.6 (at least for the near future).