Guidelines for backporting

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 18 February 2014 14:48, Chris Hegarty <chris.hegarty at oracle.com> wrote:
> On 18 Feb 2014, at 14:16, Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org> wrote:
>> ....
>> This partly resolves to whether the "spec" is the same as Javadoc. I
>> understand that the spec is not altered once the release is cut, but
>> does that mean that no changes whatsoever can go into the Javadoc? It
>> would seem wrong and inefficient to force developers to read mistakes
>> in Javadoc forevermore because of process reasons...
>
> There is already precedent set for fixing typos and grammatical errors in public, part of spec, classes, but who would build and host the updated javadoc is a separate question, I guess.

Many developers read Javadoc through their IDE using the source code
embedded within a JDK release. As such, any Javadoc fixes would be
picked up immediately in that way.

Personally, I think that the main public Javadoc for the JDK should be
updated. The number of people that care about the spec is
infinitesimally small when compared with the number of developers that
just want accurate, helpful Javadoc. (The is especially true as
Oracle's policy is to prevent alternate implementations of the spec,
making its actual spec-ness an anachronism)

Stephen