Removing the Barrier

[Bernd Eckenfels]

You can remove all comments you like. If you do not distribute the resulting binaries you do not need to provide the changes/source you made (that’s a legal requirement from the GPL license). If you do need to provide source (because you distribute binaries) then you have to retain at least all copyright messages and license headers.

This assumes the comments have no technical function, this is true for normal code but not formsome parts like for example tests where execution parameters can be found in the comments. I am not sure about other locations where code generation references comments is used (but simply speaking if a comment looks unstructured it probably has no function)

Also keep in mind that comments are visible if you generate Javadoc or need to use src.zip (think IDEs)

Having said all that, that kind of shredded code does not get you very far, it will certainly not allow to contribute changes back to OpenJDK projects. Besides changing all line numbers (by removing comments from Java classes) also makes interpreting stacktraces harder.

Gruss
Bernd
--
http://bernd.eckenfels.net

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Von: -1060516144m Auftrag von
Gesendet: Mittwoch, August 15, 2018 7:35 PM
An: core-libs-dev at openjdk.java.net
Betreff: Removing the Barrier

Can you explain how to remove the requirement for comments in the OpenJDK build in the Java source files? It's really killing my schedule to have to reinsert comments by hand.

Thanks.

Max R.

Software Developer