From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 21977 invoked by alias); 27 Jul 2006 14:56:23 -0000 Received: (qmail 21967 invoked by uid 22791); 27 Jul 2006 14:56:23 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from 62-177-154-238.dsl.bbeyond.nl (HELO lembu.sumatrasoftware.com) (62.177.154.238) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Thu, 27 Jul 2006 14:56:20 +0000 Content-class: urn:content-classes:message MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: RE: Testing JDK bugs? Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 14:56:00 -0000 Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <44C8BAFF.6080001@object-refinery.com> From: "Jeroen Frijters" To: "David Gilbert" , "Roman Kennke" Cc: , X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact mauve-discuss-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: mauve-discuss-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2006-q3/txt/msg00011.txt.bz2 David Gilbert wrote: > The theory is easy: Mauve should test AN implementation against THE=20 > spec. Pardon me for beating my favorite horse again, but this assumes that the spec is somehow more valuable than code and/or that the spec doesn't contain bugs. In the real world both are buggy and users rarely care about the spec, especially when their app works on the RI, but not on our implementation. Allow me to rebut another issue that often comes up: "We'll make it spec compliant and when someone finds an application that depends on the RI behavior then we'll copy that behavior." IMNSHO, this is actually a very dumb approach. It makes our implementation worse than the RI in two ways: 1) Apps coded against the RI (possibly) don't work out of the box. 2) Apps coded against our implementation (and spec) run the risk of breaking in the future when we randomly decide to start emulating the RI instead of the spec. Of course, things aren't black and white and issues should be decided on a case by case basis, but considering the spec holy is not doing anybody any service. Regards, Jeroen