Plans for IcedTea6 1.11

[Andrew Haley]

On 03/01/2011 11:22 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> 

> * Remove ct.sym.  ct.sym is a 15mb file which hides a number of
>   classes from the user when using javac in a very unintuitive way.
>   We should consider whether it would be worth removing this.  It
>   can already be disabled by the magic -XDignore.symbol.file=true.
>   See http://andrew-haley.livejournal.com/

This is a discussion that should first be had on the compiler-dev
mailing list.  There are arguments for removing that file, but there's
no need for such a change to be a local IcedTea patch: local patches
should be mimimized, if only to reduce breakage when merging from
upstream.

In any case, I'm not in favour, because if we remove this file now,
our users may well end up writing applications that do not compile on
other JDKs or even another version of OpenJDK.  This goes against the
principle of least surprise, at the very minimum.

It might make some sense to provide a build option that removes
ct.sym, but we shouldn't do it in IceadTea by default, because it
silently introduces incompatibilities with OpenJDK 6 at a late stage
in its development cycle.

What surely would make sense is a sane error message, but even that
should be discussed on compiler-dev.

Andrew.