Future of Eclipse Plugins

Hey All,

there is an issue with our eclipse plugins, more specifically with their 
dependencies on the eclipse platform. Eclipse has recently switched to 
Java 21 as their minimum supported Java version, which makes it 
currently impossible to update to the latest eclipse platform [1] as 
axis minimum supported Java version currently is 17. My first instinct 
was that we then should also raise our minimum required Java version 
[2], after all with the "new" Java release cycle staying on the 
second-to-latest-LTS seems to become the norm for many libraries. After 
giving it some more thought though, I think it is unreasonable to take 
this step solely because of the eclipse plugins, given that raising the 
minimum supported Java version may very much cause problems for users, 
while our eclipse plugins are currently broken anyways (AFAIK). There 
was a notice in the last release notes [3] that this is the case and 
that we're looking for maintainers in this area, as far as I know nobody 
came forward. Considering all of that I think that rather than raising 
our minimum supported Java version we should discontinue support for the 
eclipse plugins, seeing that they aren't maintained and there does not 
seem to be any interest in them in the first place. I would be in favor 
of removing the code from the source tree altogether, however I'm also 
open to simply excluding them from the build by default (on Java 
versions < 21).


I'm looking forward to your opinions and ideas in this matter. Given 
that this has a significant effect on (potential) users I of course 
don't want to make this decision on my own.


Best,

Christian


[1] https://github.com/apache/axis-axis2-java-core/pull/1149 
https://github.com/apache/axis-axis2-java-core/pull/1146 
https://github.com/apache/axis-axis2-java-core/pull/1144 
https://github.com/apache/axis-axis2-java-core/pull/1142

[2] https://github.com/apache/axis-axis2-java-core/pull/1158

[3] https://axis.apache.org/axis2/java/core/release-notes/2.0.0.html