>>>>> "Matthew" == Matthew French <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Matthew> I am guessing the Classpath project has the same issue. Is it Matthew> really practical (right now) for an open source java library Matthew> to be 100% compliant with J2SE 1.3/4/5?!? Would it not be Matthew> more pragmatic to allow people to add the features they need? Matthew> More importantly, is it necessary? The Java "way" supports Matthew> deprecation, so you know which functions are going to Matthew> disappear. In practice, things might be deprecated, but they are never deleted. This is actually a strength of Java and a concrete indication of the good job Sun has done as steward. This is really not a big issue, though, if you start from Classpath, since all the 1.0 and 1.1 things are implemented (well, actually, one method from 1.1 is missing). Matthew> I am sure the Classpath people have experience with out-of-sync API's. Matthew> Just how much of a problem is this? Sometimes it is a problem; we've seen a program or two that looks for some class to determine general "1.4"-ness or "1.5"-ness -- and if we implement that class but not some other classes, the assumptions made by the program fail. You can't really blame these programs for doing this. The answer is just to write more code in Classpath. Another problem we've had is that sometimes we've written stubs for APIs to get things to compile, but then the stubs fail at runtime. This is a pain because the stubs don't show up as bugs in the API comparison. We generally avoid this except for unusual circumstances, though. Tom
