JDK 9 RFC on 8029770: Improve user friendliness of preferences storage on Unix systems (original) (raw)

Volker Simonis volker.simonis at gmail.com
Tue Mar 11 09:02:06 UTC 2014

Another problem with links would be that not all file systems support links.

Regards, Volker

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Brian Burkhalter <brian.burkhalter at oracle.com> wrote:

On Mar 10, 2014, at 2:24 PM, Steven Schlansker wrote:

D) Bidirectional: Java 9 and pre-9 preferences would be kept in sync. If the scope of the change remains to naming only (leaving the file format the same), It is almost naming only; see below. it may be possible to implement option D via linking - either hard links or symlinks - preserving bidirectional compatibility without the need for an explicit sync operation. Interesting possibility but I don't know that it would work. Consider the case where Java 9+ creates some preferences on a system where none existed before. As it does not want to create anything using the old encoding, then any subsequently run Java 8- instance will not detect the new preferences. Also, since Java 8- would not understand the newer encoding, the entries could not be stored in the same tree as this would cause an exception when a Java 8- instance attempted to read them. If I missed something altogether, please elaborate. Thanks, Brian

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