I am concerned that supporting backwards compatibility right back to Java 8 (see PR 53) will result in problems down the line (e.g. new functionality that uses other libraries, inability to use new features in Java that could lighten the coding workload). This was the reason for ADR 8.

However, as @wviana mentioned

Big enterprise projects using ADRs are probably not on the cutting edge java version.

So my proposal would be:

• Use the the latest Java LTS version for development (as per ADR 8)
• Provide backwards compatibly for two LTS versions before (e.g developed using Java 21, compatible with Java 11 - exactly as was done in PR 57)
• The old compatibility version is signaled as being deprecated. In our current case this means that version 11 is shown as deprecated
• Supersede ADR 8 to show this change.

Any thoughts on this?