Changing required Java version for Eclipse

Question

My friend was having trouble running Eclipse Luna on his Mac running 10.6.8. Whenever he ran Eclipse, it would display an error about requiring Java 7. But, he couldn't install Java 7 due to his older OS.

After running through some strategies for solving this issue online, I failed to find a solution. So, I decided to open up the eclipse.ini file and changed this line:

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.7

to this:

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6

Then, Eclipse ran. It didn't run into an error yet.

Is this an issue of Eclipse requiring a more recent Java version than needed, or will it start to run into problems at some point?

Answer 1

The decision to require Java 1.7 is described in great detail in Eclipse bug 423734

The primary reason initially was that Java 1.6 is now end of life and is no longer being maintained.

Since the decision was taken some packages are using Java 1.7 code, there is a list here although this may have expanded since.