Re: Task: java.awt.geom.GeneralPath

[Dalibor Topic]

Hi Thomas,

Thomas wrote:
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> On Monday 10 May 2004 09:25, Michael Koch wrote:
>
> > Am Sonntag, 9. Mai 2004 08:47 schrieb Thomas Zander:
> >
> > > On Saturday 08 May 2004 18:52, Sven de Marothy wrote:
> > >
> > > > Should one aim at reproducing the Sun implementation, or at being
> > > > a 'correct' one?
> > >
> > > It is my understanding that we implement the spec; so bugs in Suns
> > > code are not relevant information for us.
> >
> > Thats not totally true, we have some places where we imitate bugs in
> > SUNs JDK to stay compatible for apps depending on this bug.
>
>
> I assume that this is done only in sporadic cases, right? My idea here was 
> that we follow the spec, and if Sun is not doing that that means either the 
> spec of their implementation should be fixed. (which is true with or without 
> classpath).

Last time around this issue was raised I said[1] something like this:

"After all, the goal shouldn't be to just have the classes, it should be 
to have the superior implementation. Having a test suite of our own 
helps in showing that everyone's implementations are buggy, but at least 
you can fix the free ones and share the fixes ;)"

> I ask this since I run into numerous bugs in their Swing 
implementation on a
> daily basis; I surely hope we strive to have a good implementation 
that makes
> coding Java-Swing easier as apposed to one that is just as buggy as Suns
> implementation for the sake of compatability.
> Before people start to say that that WORA is important; at least in 
Swing this
> is irrelevant; each version has been incompatible with the previous 
anyway.

"In the long run, the JDK is as irrelevant as an industry standard as 
SCO Unix is now. Ten years ago, there were many (closed source) 
implementations of Unix-ish OSes. GNU/Linux is gradually replacing them.

I boldly predict that the same will happen with Java. True WORA for Java 
will arrive, but it will arrive through free software efforts like mauve 
& GNU Classpath [2] that will provide the next reference platform."

Sun doesn't guarantee bug-for-bug compatiblity between releases either :)

cheers,
dalibor topic

[1] http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2003-11/msg00218.html
[2] And gcj, Kaffe, SableVM, IKVM, you name it.