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 ?

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.