On ecj and @Override annotations for interface methods

[C. K. Jester-Young]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 12:51:55AM +0100, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> I was about to suggest the same thing.  However, I don't see the immediate
> advantage as we'd still have to patch the @Override instances for non-1.6
> ecjs.  Override is a source-level annotation so it doesn't survive to bytecode
> anyway.

I guess my question is, how long do we expect to continue supporting
pre-1.6 ecjs, given more and more usage of @Override in jdk7? i.e., is
the @Override-stripping a stopgap measure, or is this a long-term thing?

In the latter case, I'm keen to edit javac.in to do some preprocessing
on the source files that are then fed to ecj...then we don't have to
write @Override-stripping patches any longer (because making them is a
lot of work, especialy if you want to keep @Override annotations that
even 1.5 ecjs can work with).

With this preprocessing solution, I feel less funny about stripping
@Override willy-nilly for files that ecj is about to touch. i.e., in a
non-ecj build, the files don't get touched at all.

Comments welcome,
	---Chris K.