JDK 9 RFC on 8029770: Improve user friendliness of preferences storage on Unix systems

[Brian Burkhalter]

On Mar 10, 2014, at 2:24 PM, Steven Schlansker wrote:

>> D) Bidirectional: Java 9 and pre-9 preferences would be kept in sync.
> 
> If the scope of the change remains to naming only (leaving the file format the same),

It is almost naming only; see below.

> it may be possible to
> implement option D via linking - either hard links or symlinks - preserving bidirectional compatibility
> without the need for an explicit sync operation.

Interesting possibility but I don't know that it would work. Consider the case where Java 9+ creates some preferences on a system where none existed before. As it does not want to create anything using the old encoding, then any subsequently run Java 8- instance will not detect the new preferences. Also, since Java 8- would not understand the newer encoding, the entries could not be stored in the same tree as this would cause an exception when a Java 8- instance attempted to read them.

If I missed something altogether, please elaborate.

Thanks,

Brian