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Subject: Re: Ant 1.7 release
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From: Stefan Bodewig <bodewig@apache.org>
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2006 06:37:24 +0200
In-Reply-To: <8AECA5AB-D87E-476F-B59F-5B8479A5AE61@gmail.com> (Kev Jackson's
 message of "Fri, 2 Jun 2006 11:35:47 +0700")
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On Fri, 2 Jun 2006, Kev Jackson <foamdino@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2 Jun 2006, at 11:16, Stefan Bodewig wrote:
> 
>>  Object signature alternative.  It is impossible to compile code on
>>  JDK 1.5 that uses the method and still works on JDK 1.4 - but the
>>  opposite is also true
> 
> This leaves us in a pickle unless we can guarantee that the every
> line of code will both compile and run correctly on all JVMs
> released since 1.2.  I'm not sure that we can guarantee to this
> level of surety.

We simply can't.  Leaving the generics/erasure problem aside, there is
a way to ensure you don't compile against methods that are too new,
but it is painful: start building with JDK 1.2, compile what hasn't
been compiled by building with JDK 1.3, repeat with JDK 1.4 and 1.5.

The pragmatic way is to assume that (1) nobody complained that Ant
1.6.5 didn't work so JDK 1.4 was fine back then and (2) the unit tests
cover quite a bit of our code so running the unit test suite with JDK
1.2 is supposed to find trouble spots.

Stefan

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