serialized annotations use sun.reflect.*

[Andrew John Hughes]

2010/1/12 Jonathan Gibbons <Jonathan.Gibbons at sun.com>:
> Mandy, Alan,
>
> In the modularization effort, is it going to be an issue that javac (and
> apt) has an explicit dependence on sun.reflect.annotation.*? Since JDK 5,
> the serialized form of annotations has used these otherwise internal
> classes. This is true both for annotations created by the runtime, and by
> javac as part of JSR 269. For full details, if you really want to, see
> 6538914 and 6270734.
> Joe and I are trying to figure out the disposition of these bugs -- whether
> to use new public classes (and break compatibility) or to accept the status
> quo that these classes should be part of the public J2SE spec.
>
> -- Jon
>

I think it's already become implictly part of the specification as it
is now.  We had to implement it for GNU Classpath:

http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/classpath/sun/reflect/annotation/AnnotationInvocationHandler.java?root=classpath&view=markup

so making it explicit and documenting it seems a very good idea!
-- 
Andrew :-)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

Support Free Java!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
http://openjdk.java.net

PGP Key: 94EFD9D8 (http://subkeys.pgp.net)
Fingerprint: F8EF F1EA 401E 2E60 15FA  7927 142C 2591 94EF D9D8