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

[Volker Simonis]

Another problem with links would be that not all file systems support links.

Regards,
Volker

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Brian Burkhalter
<brian.burkhalter at oracle.com> wrote:
>
> 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