Hamcrest Roadmap - May 2024

[Joe Schmetzer]

I'd like to after 5 years, we're well overdue for a release of Hamcrest. I haven't been maintaining the issues and PRs at all. I'm going to have a close look at everything currently in GitHub and try to do some triage. It won't be quick (I don't have a massive amount of available time, but I'll try!)

At a high level, here are some thoughts about what we can be doing. I'm cribbing from John's old projects in GitHub, but the ideas seem sensible.

Hamcrest 3.x:

- package and release for 1.8 bytecode. The 2.x release is 1.7 bytecode. That platform is now competely unsupported. Moving to 1.8 allows us to upgrade all the build infrastructure to something a bit more modern, including Gradle and the CI infrastructure (hopefully Oli can help out there)

- Once we can get this working, start to integrate any urgent PRs out there

- No signature changes, keep everything (hopefully compatible with 2.x)\

- Potential to add new features (e.g. lambda support)

Hamcrest 4.x:

- Support for more modern JDKs

- Fix up the incompatible generics (compilation currently fails if compiling under more recent jdks)

- Remove deprecated methods

- Look at JEP 238 Multi-release jar files (https://openjdk.org/jeps/238)

What do folks think? Would you add/remove anything? Big concerns or gotchas?

Cheers,
Joe