Hi,

I recently stumbled on an exception thrown when deserializing stream produced on JDK 8 and read with JDK 11. I narrowed the problem down to serialization/deserialization of a public EnumSet.class object. There were several changes made to EnumSet in the Mercurial history of jdk repo, but I think the following two broke the serialization:

http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/rev/d0e8542ef650
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/rev/a7e13065a7a0

It is interesting to note that before those two changes were made, there was a chance to fix the problem reported by newly added serial lint warnings. Unfortunately they were just silenced:

http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/rev/501d8479f798

+@SuppressWarnings("serial") // No serialVersionUID due to usage of
+                            // serial proxy pattern

It is true that serialization of instances of Serializable classes is not broken by changes to them when they implement serial proxy pattern (i.e. writeReplace() method) even if they don't itself declare a private static final long serialVersionUID field, but this is not true of Class objects representing those Serializable classes. It is even more controversial that serialization of Class objects representing non-Serializable classes is never broken (which is understandable as they don't have a habit of declaring serialVersionUID fields).

Both of the above braking changes were made post JDK 8 release, so deserialization of JDK 8 (and older) streams is affected in all JDK 9 + releases or vice versa.

So, what shall be done. I suggest adding serialVersionUID field to EnumSet vith a value that corresponds to JDK 8 serialization format and later backport this change to JDK 11.

What do you think?


Regards, Peter


PS: ImmutableCollections nested classes also implement serial proxy pattern and don't declare serialVersionUID fields, but they are not public, so it is less chance that Class objects representing them could be used in serial streams, although it is not impossible. For example:

objectOutputStream.writeObject(Set.of().getClass());

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