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I believe a precedent for this must exist... when the Java 6 JRE was released, were users of the Java 5 JRE automatically updated to Java 6 JRE?

Or to put it another way, are automatic update capable of moving you from one major version to another (e.g. from JRE 5 --> JRE 6), or do they just update the "maintenance" releases within a version (e.g. JRE 1.6.0_25 --> 1.6.0_26)?

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Probably should go to SO. – surfasb Aug 3 '11 at 10:11
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A similar question was asked on SO and told to move here! – cagcowboy Aug 3 '11 at 10:27
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It's absolutely fine to stay here. Java is something not only programmers have installed. – slhck♦ Aug 3 '11 at 10:29
@cagcowboy, thanks for finally getting some kind of answer to my question. Rather shocked that it was closed here too. – smackfu Aug 3 '11 at 12:42
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I think this depends on the OS. Microsoft can do it differently that Apple, and all of the different Linux distributions have their own policies. – KeithB Aug 3 '11 at 14:33
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closed as too localized by surfasb, akira, Nifle, Linker3000, Tom Wijsman Aug 4 '11 at 14:00

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

up vote 5 down vote accepted

No, the latter: If you had version 5, you had to download version 6 separately. At least in the past, it only updated maintenance releases. It is hard to say if version 6 will actually update to version 7 though since it has not happened yet.

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Thanks. Hopefully they'll do the same! – cagcowboy Aug 3 '11 at 10:27
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I hate java updates period. – surfasb Aug 3 '11 at 17:52
This is actually wrong. JRE 5 did update to JRE 6, although only a few updates in. Security updates are synchronised between releases. – Tom Hawtin - tackline Oct 5 '11 at 22:05

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