This is a technical release which introduces a separate publication for Java 6 legacy environments. It also improves handling of binary names in the presence of unusual characters (such as inner classes called $).
The build process was improved substantially, so it can now check the compatibility of Checkstyle Addons code with every reasonably recent Checkstyle version. An internal component was introduced which smoothes over the breaking API changes between Checkstyle versions. In this way, it is now possible to offer two distinct variants of Checkstyle Addons:
checkstyle-addons-java6, which requires the analysis process to run on Java 6 or later, and is compatible with Checkstyle 6.0 - 6.1.1- regular
checkstyle-addons, which requires the analysis process to run on Java 7 or later, and is compatible with Checkstyle 6.2 - 6.8.2 (and, hopefully, more recent versions as they become available)
Note that on every build, the build process actually tries running against the different Checkstyle runtimes, so the compatibility statement is based on the fact that it worked.