Seeking Assurance That Patching gradle-api-6.{...}.jar Is At Least Technically Possible - Somehow

[Alan Bateman]

On 12/11/2019 02:30, Plugins wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I might have spoken too soon in my last October email [1]. Ever since,
> I've
> been having a hell of a time trying to get Gradle's so-called
> „shaded“ API jar
> to play nicely with the other modules in my JPMS-build-enabling Gradle
> plugin [2]
>
> For some reason, Gradle's generated artifact redundantly duplicates all
> the
> packages of two modules from the JDK: javax.xml and jdk.xml.dom.
The Gradle devs will know but I assume these are coming from the 
xml-apis-${version}.jar (Apache Xerces project). It's not clear, to me 
anyway, why these API classes are still being distributed in 2019. The 
XML processing API was added to Java SE 1.4, the XML stream API came a 
bit later. The XML APIs started out in Java SE as "standalone 
technologies" where they were in the JDK but could be upgraded by 
deploying a newer version with the endorsed standards override 
mechanism. It's possible, and probable, that developers have been 
deploying xml-apis on the class path and got lucky that it didn't cause 
problems. Anyway, none of this makes sense since Java SE 9 as both 
JSR-206 and JSR-173 ceased to be standalone technologies (see the final 
MR for both JSRs), and mechanism to upgrade them (the endorsed standards 
override mechanism) has been removed.

-Alan.