Final nestmates spec

[David Holmes]

On 19/12/2017 9:01 AM, Dan Smith wrote:
>> On Dec 18, 2017, at 3:03 PM, David Holmes <david.holmes at oracle.com 
>> <mailto:david.holmes at oracle.com>> wrote:
>>
>> On 19/12/2017 7:28 AM, Dan Smith wrote:
>>> But letting things "show through" is, I think, never what the end 
>>> user will want. They will believe that anything in the array returned 
>>> by 'getNestMembers' actually *is* a member of the nest.
>>
>> Given we're only talking about the case where the nesthost is 
>> explicitly listed in NestMembers, or where there are duplicate 
>> (correct) entries in NestMembers, then everything in the returned 
>> array _is_ a member of the nest. The issue is whether we need to 
>> condense the array so that it holds the set of members.
> 
> Yeah, I guess I'm mostly just concerned about #2/#6—non-nest members 
> appearing in the attribute.
> 
> You said this:
> 
>> I recall no discussion of #1 and #3. For #2, #4 and #6 - ie any listed 
>> member that is not validated as being a member - we throw exceptions.
>>
>>  * <p>Each listed nest member must be validated by checking its own
>>  * declared {@linkplain #getNestHost() nest host}. Any exceptions that 
>> occur
>>  * as part of this process will be thrown.
>>
>>   * @throws LinkageError if there is any problem loading or validating
>>   * a nest member or its nest host
>>
>> In practice these will be IncompatibleClassChangeError for #2 and #6, 
>> and NoClassDefFoundError for #4.
> 
> Not clear to me that an error will occur in all cases—if I put 
> java.lang.String in my NestMembers attribute, validating 
> java.lang.String by calling its getNestHost isn't going to prompt any error.

Right I need to clarify that the validation performed in getNestMembers 
is _not_ done by calling Class.getNestHost on it - as that never throws 
any exceptions. The validation is done at the VM level. The doc quoted 
should not be linked to #getNestHost. I have an open issue to update 
getNestMembers to clarify what's been discussed.

> I agree that redundant elements are not ideal but tolerable, depending 
> on engineering considerations.

Okay.

Thanks,
David

> —Dan