Should some JDK system properties be read only ?

[David M. Lloyd]

On 12/04/2014 09:42 AM, Seán Coffey wrote:
> Apologies if this has been raised in past. I've run into issues in the
> past where bad user code (app server) has set the java.home system
> property to a value other than the default. This has consequences for
> apps/code that depend heavily on java.home returning the correct
> location. The case I saw was a JDK 7 runtime attempting to load JDK 6
> config files (since java.home was pointing to JDK 6)
>
> It leads me to question on whether we should change this behaviour.
> There are a whole bunch of properties that make no sense to change.
> Those like : java.version, java.vendor, java.home,
> java.vm.specification.version, java.vm.specification.vendor,
> java.vm.specification.name, java.vm.version, java.vm.vendor,
> java.vm.name, java.specification.version, java.specification.vendor,
> java.specification.name.
>
> Should we consider making them read only for JDK 9 and later ?

Won't work unless you fundamentally change how System.setProperties() 
works.  Right now it will accept a user-created Properties instance and 
install it as the global system properties map.

-- 
- DML