Re: mauve results posted nightly

[Stuart Ballard]

Brian Jones wrote:
> It's not a new problem, but I was able to ignore it before.  Now
> japize stops dead in its tracks.  Because I know Classpath has this
> $ClassFactory and JDK 1.4 does not... Jode must be reading something
> in Classpath's .class files referencing this and trying to use
> reflection to load it which fails under the JDK.  Again I used to see
> this (and I ignored it) but it didn't cause japize to die as it does
> now.

Looking at the stacktrace you provided, I'm not convinced that this is a 
reflection issue at it's root. First off, we can disregard the fact that 
it happens when reading java.lang.reflect - that's irrelevant to what 
it's actually doing to read the classes, of course.

The stack traces refer to java.io.UTFDataFormatException - that sounds 
like a classfile format problem because I know that the classfile format 
contains a lot of UTF-formatted data. Does this continue to happen if 
you compile Classpath (or even just java.lang.reflect.Proxy) with a 
different Java compiler?

(I have no idea whether this is Jode misinterpreting perfectly valid 
information, or the compiler emitting an invalid classfile).

I suspect that what's happening is that due to this 
UTFDataFormatException in the classfile, Jode is falling back to trying 
to read the class another way, and the only other way it has is 
Reflection. When Japize asks the class whether it's deprecated, then, it 
has no way to find out, because reflection doesn't carry that 
information - so even if you *were* using a Java implementation that 
included the class, it still wouldn't solve the problem.

I think we need to figure out whether the root cause of this 
UTFDataFormatException is due to a malformed class file (in which case 
the compiler needs to be fixed) or a Jode bug (in which case, of course, 
we need to fix that).

To that end, would you like to mail the offending class file(s) to the 
Jode maintainer and ask for an informed opinion (unless you happen to 
know the internals of the classfile format yourself, which I certainly 
don't ;) )? Or would you like to email the classfile to me, and I'll 
contact the Jode maintainer myself?

Thanks,
Stuart.

--
Stuart Ballard, Programmer
NetReach - Internet Solutions
(215) 283-2300, ext. 126
http://www.netreach.com/