JRE6 Backport Discontinuing?

[rnveach]

I don't have much to say.

While trying to upgrade to version 9, things are becoming apparent that more and more overrides are needed to maintain the Java 6 compatibility while also maintaining compatible with Checkstyle and it's features.

A test area can be seen at: https://github.com/rnveach/checkstyle-backport-jre6/commits/work

With the introduction of newer ANTLR 4 parser, there is a break in the library that was only fixed after the JRE upgrade. This requires a weird hack to build the internal Java code from the grammar with a newer version, and then downplay the runtime ANTLR back to JRE 6 compatibility for release while hacking the internal library version check.

The reflections library is not JRE 6 compatible and currently has no replacement.

Then there are the tests here and there that use newer features and are becoming complex to find a backport solution. Even with a current fix I was working on, I don't this it would be fully compatible with checkstyle.

JRE 8 has become more common, even for me.

Unless something changes, I will most likely discontinue this repo for JRE 6 backward compatibility. I will still move toward to maintain JRE 8 backward compatibility as Checkstyle itself is now moving towards JRE 11 ( checkstyle/checkstyle#9146 ).

The new 8 repo can be found at https://github.com/rnveach/checkstyle-backport-jre8 .