Changed behavior of ParameterizedTypeImpl::toString in 1.8.0_171

[Alan Bateman]

On 27/04/2018 19:23, Rafael Winterhalter wrote:
> Hei Alan and David,
> thanks for pointing me to the issue, I have only searched the release 
> notes for u172 by accident.
>
> The issue is mainly during builds. I run my library on multiple CI 
> servers to cover Windows/Linux and different Java versions from 6-11. 
> Unfortunately, I have not full control over what version of Java is 
> run on these servers. Yesterday, I found some of the builds fail for 
> pull requests what was a bit confusing. Byte Buddy offers an 
> abstraction over type descriptions that implement similar semantics to 
> the Java reflection API when it comes to equality and to textual 
> (toString) representations. These tests suddenly failed since the JVMs 
> representation is changed, this is all. The Scala build had a similar 
> problem: https://github.com/scala/bug/issues/10835
>
> This is not a big deal but I found it surprising to have a change in 
> the string representation within an update release. Especially since a 
> nested class does not necessarily have the same name prefix if a class 
> is not compiled with javac. I would have preferred the consistency 
> over the redundancy; especially when type names are machine-processed, 
> this often makes a parser easier to implement.
There isn't sufficient information in the bug to understand why it was 
back-ported to 8u172. That said, aren't you replying on unspecified 
behavior? I don't think toString is specified here.

-Alan