Abandon java 7 in favour of Java 8 as a baseline

[andrej-urvantsev]

That will allow to fix #282 without additional dependencies.

[aharonha]

This Is a great idea, although some legacy dependent projects might break.
This calls for new versioning or forking.

[aharonha]

I believe that #286 would also be fixed.
Just working with java.time package would do the job.

[aadrian]

some legacy dependent projects might break.

@aharonha what projects do you mean?

[aharonha]

@aharonha what projects do you mean?

ones that we can't see ;-)

[aharonha]

Just working with java.time package would do the job.

e.g. this PR #311

[azagniotov]

@aharonha moving to Java 8 is definitely a breaking & non-backwards compatible change. I imagine the major version would need to be incremented, i.e.: 10.0.0

[lhazlewood]

Because of a backwards-incompatible breaking change, semver requires this to wait until at least 1.0.0. Assigning that milestone and we'll deal with it at that time.

[UkrainianCitizen]

I can help with the migration to the java.time.* or to Java 8 at all. @lhazlewood do you need such a help?

[franchyd]

According to this: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/ more than half of all android devices still ran on Java 7 last year. (Java 8 is on devices with API 24+).

A lot of people seem to forget that Android Java has a different release schedule than regular Java. While regular Java may be at version 11, Android Java is still barely jumping into Java 8 compatability.

Furthermore, 2018 Java 7 usage was still relatively high among most Java developers according to https://www.jetbrains.com/research/devecosystem-2018/java/