Re: japi and protected field declaring classes

[Stuart Ballard]

On 10/5/05, Mark Wielaard <address@hidden> wrote:
> Changing things just because japi doesn't give a full green bar is wrong
> to start with anyway. Japi can contain bugs.

This statement works two ways. Blindly changing Classpath because japi
doesn't give a full green bar is certainly a bad idea and
understanding the why is very important indeed. That's why I didn't,
for example, submit a patch which added the package-private NameImpl
class just so we could get compatibility with the useless "impl" field
in the JDK, but opened up a debate about what japi should do instead.

On the other hand I do think it should be possible to get full green
for everything in Classpath; in places where that's not currently
possible without doing stupid stuff, or requires matching Sun on
something that truly is an implementation detail and not part of the
public API, I consider that a japi bug, and I'm committed to fixing
any such japi bugs that are found. Hence the reason for starting this
thread, and several others in the past, about what the right behavior
for japitools in particular situations is.

By the way, I noticed another situation japitools shouldn't care about
declaring location of fields: if the field is final, it can't be
modified by any outside code. I've implemented this in my local copy
and it will be picked up by tonight's run. But I'd still really like
feedback about whether I've missed any cases where it is, or isn't,
important.

Stuart.

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