[REFRESH] JDK 9 RFR of JDK-8035279: Clean up internal deprecations in BigInteger

[Brian Burkhalter]

On Feb 28, 2014, at 5:54 PM, Stuart Marks wrote:

> Woops, I forgot a couple points.
> 
> The @serial for the 'signum' field at line 130 should be removed. Note that even though this has the same name as the field that appears in the serialized form, the text from the @serialField tag for 'signum' that's part of the serialPersistentFields doc comment is the one that actually appears on the "Serialized Form" page.
> 
> It might be worthwhile copying the more verbose description from lines 125-128 to the @serialField tag text (lines 4206-4207) since this describes the requirements on the serialized form more precisely. I hate redundancy in documentation, though.
> 
> Note that the field names in the ObjectStreamField entries of the serialPersistentFields array don't necessarily match the actual fields in the class. In this case 'signum' matches but the others do not. That's ok. The entries in this array describe the field names that are used in the serialized output, which is essential for remaining compatible with older versions of BigInteger.

That was my understanding so it's good to have it corroborated.

> I checked an old version of BigInteger from 1998 and the field names used here match the actual, serialized fields from that old version.

This sort of detail is really good to hear. I'll incorporate the lot when I update.

Thanks much!

Brian