Re: Japitools 1.5 support tough design issue

[Casey Marshall]

From this description it kind of sounds as though JVML (that is,  
bytecode) defies the kind of static analysis Japitools is trying to  
do. At least, when you aren't guaranteed to have the entire class  
tree down to Object.

Maybe it would be a useful tool that took two sets of class files,  
and compared them for binary compatibility, applying the same  
semantics that would be used when looking up methods or fields when  
run in a VM. That is, each available method or field in the base set  
would be looked up in the target one, to see if it is equivalently  
accessible. I guess this might produce, uh, interesting results,  
where Classpath might prove entirely binary compatible, but not  
source compatible, so you could run binaries against Classpath, but  
not compile them ;-)  (I'm no JVM expert, so I don't know if this is  
true).

But anyway, it is best to target meaningful compatibility issues, and  
to do that in a tractable way. So, what does API compatibility mean  
as far as Classpath is concerned? And what is the best (or easiest)  
way to test that?