Why does Oracle publish 2 versions of JDK each time? [closed]

Question

At the time of this question, if you want to download Oracle JDK, you can download v8u91 AND v8u92.

Why 2 versions ?

Russi

It is common practice in enterprise software to support the current and previous (i.e. 2) releases. This practice is not limited to Oracle's Java, but many of their other products follow this suit. – Peristome

Read this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning – Dedie

Oracle differenciates between odd numbered Critical Patch Update (CPU) and even numbered Patch Set Update (PSU) and sometimes releases both of them at the same time. They describe these release types and their differences under oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/… – Orderly

SuperUser doesn't think this question is "opinion" based - superuser.com/questions/1110066/… – Nurse

Why is this a closed question??? This is an awesome question. Falls right in the category of "why did Apple name its OS?". – Sheepwalk

All users should use odd numbered (CPU, Critical Patch Updates, ie 8u201) except the one who has been hit by particular broken patch in CPU - even numbered PSU (Patch Set Updates, ie 8u202) contains "waiting/hot" patches. See link in martin's comment above. – Luncheonette

Answer 1

The lower version is a more conservative build, more production ready. The higher version has more optimisations which is fine for development, possibly production, and allows them to release optimisations and features they would like to release but haven't been as well tested.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

Java SE 8u92 is a patch-set update, including all of 8u91 plus additional features (described in the release notes).

In particular the differences documented are

SHA224 removed from the default support list if SunMSCAPI enabled SunJSSE allows SHA224 as an available signature and hash algorithm for TLS 1.2 connections. However, the current implementation of SunMSCAPI does not yet support SHA224. This can cause problems if SHA224 and SunMSCAPI private keys are used at the same time.

To mitigate the problem, we remove SHA224 from the default support list if SunMSCAPI is enabled.

See JDK-8064330.

New JVM Options added: ExitOnOutOfMemoryError and CrashOnOutOfMemoryError Two new JVM flags have been added:

ExitOnOutOfMemoryError - When you enable this option, the JVM exits on the first occurrence of an out-of-memory error. It can be used if you prefer restarting an instance of the JVM rather than handling out of memory errors.

CrashOnOutOfMemoryError - If this option is enabled, when an out-of-memory error occurs, the JVM crashes and produces text and binary crash files (if core files are enabled).

See JDK-8138745.

In short, if you are rushing a version into production, use the lower version, or NEVER rush a new version into production, use the higher version and test your application with it.

Eady

Thanks for this comprehensive answer! – Sheepwalk

It's ridiculous that this question was closed as "opinion-based". All you need to do is remove the "AFAIK" from the beginning of the answer and it's no longer "opinion-based" but rather a clear question and answer. – Patentee