RFR: 7178922 : (props) re-visit how os.name is determined on Mac

[Brent Christian]

Any more comments on this?

-Brent

On 11/14/12 1:23 PM, Brent Christian wrote:
> Thanks, Sergey.
>
> It's good that we standardized on the recommended usage within the JDK
> in order to stay ahead of a possible change to the value of ProductName
> in /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist
>
> But we can expect that Java application developers use the same variety
> of OS platform checks.  Which is why we should maintain the current
> value (versus risking apps breaking in the event of a change in
> ProductName used by OS X), especially considering that it works fine
> with the recommended osName.contains("OS X").
>
> As is suggested in the bug report, if the Mac's OS changes so radically
> that we should be reporting a new os.name ("Mac OS XI", or who knows
> what), we will almost certainly need to update the JDK to run on it, at
> which time we can also change the value of os.name.
>
> Thanks,
> -Brent
>
> On 11/13/12 5:05 PM, Sergey Bylokhov wrote:
>> So many efforts was done to unify this style across the jdk
>> http://monaco.sfbay.sun.com/detail.jsf?cr=7147461
>> http://monaco.sfbay.sun.com/detail.jsf?cr=7130404
>> changesets
>> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/awt/jdk/rev/77b35c5c4b95
>> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/hsx/hotspot-rt/hotspot/rev/970cbbba54b0
>> http://closedjdk.us.oracle.com/hsx/hotspot-rt/hotspot/test/closed/rev/40505e5a55e8
>>
>>
>>
>> Note that official documentation from apple suggest: contains("OS X")
>> https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2002/tn2110.html
>>
>> 14.11.2012 2:50, Brent Christian wrote:
>>> At present, the JDK port for OS X gets its value for os.name from a
>>> JRS function exported by the Apple Java Runtime Support framework.
>>>
>>> Historically this has either been "Mac OS X", or "Mac OS X Server",
>>> but there have been reports that this could change at any time, e.g.
>>> to just "OS X".  This would break any app that relies on this property
>>> to detect the Mac platform using something like:
>>>
>>> System.getProperty("os.name").startsWith("Mac").
>>>
>>> To ensure compatibility going forward, the os.name System property on
>>> Mac should be hard-coded to the value that is expected, "Mac OS X".
>>> (FWIW, as of 10.7 Mac OS X Server is no longer a separate edition of
>>> the OS).
>>>
>>> Webrev is here:
>>> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~bchristi/7178922/webrev.0/
>>>
>>> Note: the setUnknownOSAndVersion() function is unused following my
>>> change, so I went ahead and removed it.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> -Brent
>>
>>