Reviewer and committer request for 7198496

[David Holmes]

Paul,

On 3/10/2012 10:50 PM, Paul Sandoz wrote:
> For the benefit of others; for some context see this recent thread:
>
> http://markmail.org/search/?q=openjdk#query:openjdk%20list%3Anet.java.openjdk.core-libs-dev%20order%3Adate-backward+page:2+mid:inod424lqbey5fms+state:results
>
> Basically ServiceLoader is treating a null CL parameter as the system CL for loading the META-INF/services resources file and as the bootstrap CL for loading the classes of class names declared in those resource files.
>
> Which also means that calls to:
>
>    ServiceLoader.load(serviceInterface)
>    ServiceLoader.load(serviceInterface, Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader());
>
> Will behave oddly if the TCCL is null, from the JavaDoc of Thread.getContextClassLoader():
>
>    http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/Thread.html#getContextClassLoader()
>    Returns:
>    the context ClassLoader for this Thread, or null indicating the system class loader (or, failing that, the bootstrap class loader)

The @return doc for getContextClassLoader is wrong, or at best 
mis-leading. A null return does NOT indicate the system class loader 
(which is never null) - it simply means there is no CCL for that thread. 
If anything null would represent the bootstrap loader.

David
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> Paul.