Expected behavior with -esa

[David Holmes]

On 24/11/2011 6:04 AM, Brandon Passanisi wrote:
> I'm currently looking at a bug report:
> http://monaco.sfbay.sun.com/detail.jsf?cr=5066854 which describes an
> issue where a simple program was run with the option -esa to enable
> system assertions. The bug author describes that, in the provided sample
> code, an AssertionError occurs when the spec says a
> MissingFormatArgumentException should be thrown. When running the sample
> program without the -esa option, a MissingFormatArgumentException is
> thrown. It seems to me that it shouldn't be unexpected to see an
> AssertionError when -esa is used, instead of the
> MissingFormatArgumentException. In fact, this behavior appears to not be
> limited to this particular test case, and can possibly occur with other
> APIs if an AssertionError is seen before an expected exception. I was
> hoping to see some sort of explanation in the evaluation or comments
> section of the bug report, but the bug report was only updated with
> references about how the bug was filed too late for a release. Can
> someone clarify if this behavior with -esa is actually a bug?

I would say it is a bug. Asserts should not be checking conditions that 
are part of the defined contract for a method. So TCK style tests should 
still work/pass whether -esa is set or not.

David