John Arthorne wrote:
Yes, this is a potential problem. I
think many of our packed artifacts currently require the Java 6 version
of pack200 for unpacking. Another example I noticed this morning is
source
bundles, which don't contain any class files, are not packed in a
backwards
compatible way. I entered bug 275295 for this. I can't remember if
there
was a strong reason for using the java 6 edition of pack200 for the
packing.
Obviously if we packed with the java 5 edition of pack200, we wouldn't
have this compatibility problem.
That's true, but it also require all projects to build their site using
a Java 1.5. It entered its End Of Life period in April 2008 and will no
longer be supported after October this year. It's easy to demand that
all projects produce .class files targeted for 1.5, but I think it
might be a bit harsh to demand that they all use old tools that are no
longer supported.
Personally, I see this as a missing part of an otherwise good tool.
Pack200 should have an option or something to control this. One way to
overcome this deficiency is to check if a file is missing .class files
and when that happens, change the magic. I've tried that, and it seems
to work just fine.
- thomas
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