Comments on 7080038: "(ann) Serializable types in sun.reflect.annotation do not declare serialVersionUIDs"

[Joe Darcy]

Hello.

A few comments on the fix for 7080038: (ann) Serializable types in 
sun.reflect.annotation do not declare serialVersionUIDs recently pushed 
into the JDK 8 TL forest:

    http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/tl/jdk/rev/71e353aba896

In some testing that occurred post JDK 7 GA, we found a compatibility 
issue in serializing annotation objects across releases.  An otherwise 
innocuous bug fix in JDK 7 (6761678) inadvertently changed the 
serialVersionUID of one of the classes used to represent serialized 
annotation objects.  This fix restores the original serialVersionUID 
values in those classes to the values from JDK 5/JDK 6 and thus restores 
serial compatibility.

The addition of these explicit serialVersionUIDs will also be done to 
other affected release trains, including JDK 7 update and OpenJDK 6.

Cheers,

-Joe