RFR: 8062194: java.util.jar.Attributes should use insertion-ordered iteration

[Martin Buchholz]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Alan Bateman <Alan.Bateman at oracle.com> wrote:
> On 28/10/2014 18:09, Martin Buchholz wrote:
>>
>> Xueming, I understand that getting CCC approval is a fair amount of
>> work.  At your option, we could leave the spec unchanged and do
>> without CCC, given that Attributes' iteration order has changed in
>> every past release.  Or we could split the spec change off as a
>> separate improvement.
>>
> If we eventually want to specify that the iteration order is predictable
> then it's probably best to do it all together.
>
> The additional class description looks okay. One comment on the constructor
> that takes the Attributes parameter is that the newly created Attributes
> might have a different order to the Attributes that it was created with.
> This would only arise if Attributes is sub-classes by something that uses a
> different iteration order to its super.

So ... there is the question whether we are tightening the spec for
Attributes and its subclasses or only for Attributes.
Subclasses of Attribute that would change the order are likely to be
very rare (is there a use case?) - I'm OK with those becoming
non-spec-compliant subclasses, especially given that they will
continue to work just fine in practice.  So in my proposal the
tightening applies to subclasses as well.