Reproducible Properties

[Alan Bateman]

On 01/10/2019 01:13, Aaron Scott-Boddendijk wrote:
> A tiny datapoint, but this would remove an annoyance in managing clean 
> configurations of a Minecraft server - `server.properties` suffers 
> from the same time-stamped comment and unpredictable ordering 
> (currently requiring a cleaning script to strip the comment and sort 
> keys).
>
> Not only would it be nice to have the ability, via an overload, for 
> the caller to specify preferred ordering but it'd be nice if a system 
> property could be provided to choose the default order for the 
> `Properties` writer.
>
I see Mark has created JDK-8231640 [1] to look at introduce a new store 
method that store the properties in canonical form. I couldn't find any 
other issues on this issue.

As regards the existing methods. The ordering is not specified so there 
is flexibility to have the implementation write in sorted order. I don't 
think we can do anything about the date/time stamp without specification 
changes, e.g. re-specify the comment parameter so that a non-null value 
is the only comment lines that are written. The impact of changing these 
methods it is not clear and introducing a new APIs would be safer route.

-Alan

[1] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8231640