Ship jdk7 ct.sym with jdk8?

[Jonathan Gibbons]

On 03/11/2013 04:29 PM, Martin Buchholz wrote:
> If you want to build some java software that targets jdk6, the natural 
> way to do it is via -target 6.  But then javac will complain it also 
> wants -source 6 (that's easy to fix) but also a bootclasspath for 
> jdk6, which is harder for the user to provide.
>
> One obvious way to make the user's life easier is to ship a ct6.sym, 
> ct7.sym, ct8.sym,
> where each .sym contains the deltas relative to the previous version. 
>  Then we could have -target 6 default to compiling against ct6.sym, 
> while -target 8 will default to ct8.sym:ct7.sym:ct6.sym
>
> Perhaps you are already doing this kind of thing to support profiles 
> in jdk8?

It would be logistically hard to include binary products from earlier 
builds in the current build.

A better solution would be to verify that the @since tags are up to date 
(I know you did this for JDK 5) and then feed the @since info into 
ct.sym, so that the current ct.sym knows about when API was first 
available.  That way, the user could specify -target 6, and javac could 
use the appropriate subset of ct.sym.

-- Jon