Which version of "googleJavaFormat" to use?

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Refactor
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
build-system

Research direction

Start by reviewing the current spotless-maven-plugin and googleJavaFormat setup, then run ./mvnw spotless:check with the relevant JDK versions. Done means choosing and documenting a supported version strategy, updating the configuration if needed, and confirming formatting checks work for the intended JDK range.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Currently we are using spotless-maven-plugin:2.44.4 together with googleJavaFormat 1.19.1 to format the java sources. This does not work in JDK8 but all later versions.
With JDK25, spotless-maven-plugin:3.0.0 and googleJavaFormat 1.27.0 are the minimal versions. Older versions will simply fail when ./mvnw spotless:check is executed.
This version does require JDK17 or higher.
I see three options to continue:
a) Stick with 2.44.4 and 1.19.1 and do not run spotless in JDK25 and later.
b) Upgrade to 3.00 and 1.27.0 and do not run spotless in JDK16 and earlier.
c) Choose the spotless version depending on the JDK version.

a) Is least effort for existing developers, but makes onboarding for new contributors more complicated.
b) Is least effort for new developers, might be a problem if someone is required to use a JDK before 17.
c) At the moment, the differences in the formatters (mostly indenting in comments) have no impact on existing code. That might change with added documentation in the future, resulting in formatters changing back and forth.

My prefered solution is b). Are there any showstoppers?
Alternatively we could go for c) until we have see a problem and switch to b) then.

What are your thoughts?

Dominant language
Java
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