If you don't like my alternative, fine; it has its own set of tradeoffs
that might be net positive or negative. If you want to proceed with the
current approach, then I won't stand in the way. At the very least there
should be some boilerplate added to EnumSet that makes it clear that
EnumSet itself never appears in the serial form.
I don't disagree, there are many things that could be improved.
I only volunteered to bring EnumSet (as the poster child for the Serialization
Proxy Pattern) into a no-worse state than other classes implementing the
pattern. The doc of the writeReplace and readObject methods is pretty good
implicit documentation that the pattern applies here. Serialization overall
remains as deeply flawed as ever.
I still plan to submit what I have now.
Thanks for volunteering. It goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished. :-)
To close the loop on this, I think what you have is acceptable. I also think
that "no-worse state" is a better characterization than "Best Practice," which
seems to imply that no further improvement is possible or necessary. And
finally, Jon Gibbons has filed JDK-8193019 to cover future javadoc enhancements
to better support serialization.
s'marks
