Java 17 upgrade

[sandraanderson1]

We would like to upgrade the library to Java 17. cqlmigrate library is a dependency for umc/shared/cql-migrator which we are looking to upgrade from 11 to 17.

The tasks would include:

• upgrading gradle from 5.3 - 7.6
• removing cassandra-unit dependency (as it does not support Java 17) - it can be replaced with cassandra containers (this would be added) or potentially simulacron (which is already on the classpath)
• changing source/targetCompatibility to from Java 8 to Java 17
• resolving compilation/deprecation issues
• testing updated version with our library (including deploying jobs in lower envs) before releasing

[michaelmcfadyensky]

changing source/targetCompatibility to from Java 8 to Java 17

cqlmigrate is an open source project so upgrading to java 17 would mean dropping support for any of our users that are still on an older version of java than 17. I think we would need to discuss an approach on how we would want to do it (or even if we would want to do it).

upgrading gradle from 5.3 - 7.6

We could split out the gradle upgrade to a different github issue as that should be doable without much complication.

[davidh87]

To understand motivations, are there things in cqlmigrate that prevent other applications upgrading to java17+, or is this just a general library maintenance thing?

Considering the pace of development on cqlmigrate, I think we could safely upgrade past java8 now (with appropriate major releases); if we do proceed I would recommend might be worth bumping to java11 (releasing as 1.x), then bumping to java17 (releasing as 2.x).

I suspect we would need to keep the ability to patch old versions though, via some releasing branches or similar? Java8 and java11 are still used widely

[sandraanderson1]

Hi, thanks for comments, our initial motivations were to allow us to upgrade cql-migrator, however it may be actually possible to do it without making changes to cqlmigrate. So we'll do this first and if we come across any issues between the libraries we can revert here.