some more fiddling

[michael keith]

So I did some playing around with b72 in a couple of ways.

First, I went and modified all of the current JPA container annotations 
to be JDK 8 repeatable (using @ContainerFor and @ContainedBy, since 
@Repeatable did not seem to be included) and compiled it using b72. Then 
I took the JPA RI (EclipseLink) code and its existing JPA tests and 
built them using JDK 1.7_11. I then ran the tests using b72 and found 
that all of the tests passed, so basically existing code and test cases 
compiled using a previous JDK will continue to work (at least in the 
test cases that I ran). So the first "do no harm" test seems to have 
passed :-)

The next thing I did was up the ante and move on to creating tests using 
new features (e.g. repeating annotations) to see how compatible the code 
would be. In other words, I wanted to make sure the same processing code 
could handle repeating annotations using the old API. It turned out not 
to work, though, so either the compatibility layer that we discussed 
before Christmas isn't done yet, or the current support just doesn't 
work as expected. For example, invoking getAnnotation(Foo.class) on both

@Foo(1) @Foo(2)
class A {}

and

@FooContainer({@Foo(1), @Foo(2)})
class A {}

both returned @Foo(1). In both of these cases it should have returned null.

This, combined with the fact that the Repeatable annotation was not 
shipped in b72 leads me to believe that the compatibility support is 
still forthcoming. Do you folks have any estimates for when it will be 
ready to try out?

Thanks,
-Mike