From this description it kind of sounds as though JVML (that is,
bytecode) defies the kind of static analysis Japitools is trying to
do. At least, when you aren't guaranteed to have the entire class
tree down to Object.
Maybe it would be a useful tool that took two sets of class files,
and compared them for binary compatibility, applying the same
semantics that would be used when looking up methods or fields when
run in a VM. That is, each available method or field in the base set
would be looked up in the target one, to see if it is equivalently
accessible. I guess this might produce, uh, interesting results,
where Classpath might prove entirely binary compatible, but not
source compatible, so you could run binaries against Classpath, but
not compile them ;-) (I'm no JVM expert, so I don't know if this is
true).
But anyway, it is best to target meaningful compatibility issues, and
to do that in a tractable way. So, what does API compatibility mean
as far as Classpath is concerned? And what is the best (or easiest)
way to test that?
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