May I request OpenJDK6 be phased out instead. Perhaps fully removed in 12 months (e.g. Fedora 19). Flipping the switch like this is not cool for developers developing specifically for OpenJDK6. I personally use Fedora to write Java that gets deployed on Windows and our current target is still OpenJDK6. A specific OpenJDK should not be a reason for someone to withhold upgrading the entire rest of their desktop stack. I'm worried the exact same thing is happening with Tomcat (as seen by the decision to name the Tomcat 7 package "tomcat" as opposed to the previous convention; tomcat5, tomcat6, etc. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=700199#c35 ). Within Fedora is there a general policy on how major SDK's are upgraded (phased out vs. immediate dropping?).
Well, I'm pretty sure that if someone volunteers to maintain older openjdk and/or tomcat versions noone will oppose. The problem is that currently we are really thinspread and there is no manpower to keep maintaining more than a single version. About policies - no policy can workaround the no sufficient manpower problem.(Alex Kurtakov)