RE: [cp-patches] Stupid spec constant values

[Jeroen Frijters]

Mark Wielaard wrote:
> The RCSID fields really serve no good purpose and I would just propose
> we remove these fields and ask for a japi override mode to 
> ignore them.
> I bet the value of these fields even changes between minor releases.

They never change. They only exist because of an historical accident,
way back. I don't have a strong opinion on whether we should copy them
or not, but I certainly have no objection against it (and I'd like the
Japi scores to be as high as reasonably possible).

> The LoaderHandler.packagePrefix is also a bit subtle. The 
> only way I can see why/how people are using it is to check whether
> a LoaderHandler is actually the system LoaderHandler implementation.
> So changing it to something that isn't actually the package that we
> define it in might break code (not seen actual code that does that
> though).

This one is very subtle. Since it is a compile time constant, the
compiler will inline the value, so if a piece of code is compiled
against GNU Classpath and then run on Sun's JDK (or vice versa) you get
incorrect results. So I'd argue for changing our constants to match
Sun's.

Regards,
Jeroen