Removing methods is clearly an incompatible change (both source and binary). It should be noted that the impending removal of these methods is flagged in the Public Review of JSR 337. The release notes for JDK 8 also include a warning that they methods have been deprecated with a view to their outright removal. As noted in the CCC for 7192274, our analysis indicates that these methods are rarely used and therefore we do not expect the impact to be huge. By removing the methods early in JDK 9 then it allows developers tracking JDK 9 or testing early builds to identify any dependency quickly. At this time we do not propose a replacement/alternative for these methods although this will be looked at as part of other work to improve java.util.loggging in JDK 9.