RFR 9 8055330: (process spec) ProcessBuilder.start and Runtime.exec should throw UnsupportedOperationException ...

[Alan Bateman]

On 31/01/2015 16:15, Martin Buchholz wrote:
> It's not a big deal, but I am opposed to this change.
Just an FYI that Roger seems to have pushed the original patch, this new 
patch just moves the text down so that it flows a bit better.

> The old spec
>
>      * <p>In such cases an exception will be thrown. The exact nature
>      * of the exception is system-dependent, but it will always be a
>      * subclass of {@link IOException}.
>
> is perfectly adequate for OSes with no subprocesses.
> Users should be catching and handling IOException in any case.  
> Throwing a RuntimeException seems wrong, and breaks the above promise!
>
It's lack of clarity in the above text that has been causing the 
testability issue for so long so I think it is good to make it clear how 
an implementation that does not support processes should behave. The 
options on the table seem to be to define a sub-type of IOE for this 
case, specify that an IOE be thrown with an UOE as the cause, or just 
throw UOE when this feature is not supported.

-Alan