Brave 6

Brave 6 removes all modules and functions deprecated in Brave 5.x. It no longer has any dependency on io.zipkin.zipkin2:zipkin. Special thanks to @reta and @anuraaga for a lot of review support leading to this release!

No more deprecated functions

The final release of Brave 5 with deprecated functions was 5.18.1. Removing these functions was the only way to decouple Brave from zipkin's core library (io.zipkin.zipkin2:zipkin). However, this does not change Brave's floor Java 6 support. We still integration test this via the brave-example repository.

Here's an example of a working Java 6 and Spring 2.5 application, which is 280KB smaller due to use of the lean combination of Brave 6 and Zipkin Reporter 3.x:

# brave 5.18.1
3860    target/brave-example-webmvc25-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war
# brave 6.0.0
3580    target/brave-example-webmvc25-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war

No more io.zipkin.reporter2:zipkin-reporter or io.zipkin.zipkin2:zipkin dependencies

io.zipkin.brave:brave-bom used to manage zipkin-reporter dependencies. Since Brave no longer has dependencies on zipkin, it no longer manages them.

This impact is that users will need to manage their own versions for zipkin-reporter, likely via io.zipkin.reporter2:zipkin-reporter-bom described in the zipkin-reporter README.

To fully remove a zipkin core library dependency from your traced applications, use io.zipkin.reporter2:zipkin-reporter-brave 3.x AsyncZipkinSpanHandler. This is described in the zipkin-reporter README. You can expect currently maintained frameworks to do this on your behalf.

Thanks for your patience with the major upgrade. Things like this allow easier maintenance and a longer life for Brave, particularly as zipkin-server moves ahead with later Java versions.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/openzipkin/brave/compare/5.17.1..5.18.1