Feedback requested: Requiring Solr 8 in the next major rev (Blacklight v8.0)

[Benjamin Armintor]

Hello!

On the committers' call today, we discussed the very broad range of Solr versions presumed to be supported in Blacklight v7.x.

With the release of Solr 9 in May, all versions of Solr < 8.11 are outside of official support: https://solr.apache.org/downloads.html#about-versions-and-support

We would like to propose that the next major revision of Blacklight requires Solr 8+. This will be a breaking change, as we will begin simplifying/rewriting parts of the Solr querying in Blacklight to take advantage of features introduced through the Solr 8 release.

The issue to track this change is here: https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/issues/2779

If you have feedback or concerns, please comment on the issue.

Regards,

Ben (on behalf of the committers)