Repeating Annotations and backwards compatibility

[Alex Buckley]

On Thursday, September 13, 2012 9:04:39 AM, Paul Benedict wrote:
> Was there any consideration given to NOT retrofitting annotations? That is,
> just allow repeating annotations; those with historical grouping
> annotations have to retain them to maintain the same reflection results.
> Then no "looking through" magic needs to occur at the reflection level. I
> think that's much more straight-forward than what's being proposed.

The goal was to be able to write repeating annotations without writing 
the container annotation manually, and still have legacy consumers work 
without modification when they a) expect a container annotation from 
getAnnotation(Class<T>) and b) do not expect repeating annotations from 
get[Declared]Annotations(). The Java EE group believes the number of 
these legacy consumers to be significant.

New consumers which use the new get[Declared]Annotations(Class<T>) 
methods can choose to ignore container annotations and grab the 
possibly-repeated annotations directly.

Alex