Reproducible Properties

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

// Meant to send this yesterday ...

2019/9/30 2:51:12 -0700, magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com:
> On 2019-09-29 18:46, Robert Scholte wrote:
>> ...
>> 
>> I wasn't expecting a complete replacement of the Date(), but more a 
>> way to either set the date or skip the date in the comment( like 
>> setCommentDate(Date date) ).
>> As one might see in the code, writing properties is not that easy. My 
>> concern is that any third party attempt to do this on its own will not 
>> be as good as the original implementation.
> 
> Being in a situation to trying to get reproducible builds to OpenJDK 
> itself, I understand your pain and fully support the idea that it should 
> be at least *possible* for the standard methods to produce reproducible 
> output. Adding an additional property to ignore the date, or set it to a 
> given fixed date, seems like a very good idea to me.
> 
> ...
> 
> So I'd strongly recommend adding a second property to enforce sorted (or 
> "stable" by some other definition) output, to be fully certain to 
> achieve reproducibility.

Rather than add configuration state to this already (over!) complicated
class, wouldn’t a simple `storeCanonical` method do the trick?  It would
just write the entries in key-name order, without any comments.

Filed: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8231640

- Mark