On 1/7/2015 1:44 AM, Paul Sandoz wrote:
On Jan 7, 2015, at 12:12 AM, joe darcy <joe.da...@oracle.com> wrote:Hello, As part of cleaning up the deprecation facility in 9, please review this change to document when a @Deprecated annotation is a no-op: 6481080 : (ann) @Deprecated annotation has no effect on packages http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~darcy/6481080.0/+1 I am curious to know why @Deprecated was originally allowed to be declared on local variables and packages if it has no effect. I can imagine for the latter there might be some computational issue with javac and I suppose there is still some source code documentation value and other tools can still crunch on it.
Back in JDK 5 when annotations were added, the Deprecated annotation type was initially unconstrained in what it could be applied to (no @Target meta-annotation) [1]. I believe this was just a small oversight in part of the libraries work in 5.
A target list was added in 7 as an outgrowth of the JDK 308 work (to make sure Deprecated wasn't a TYPE_USE). [2] For compatibility, the target list included all the JDK 5-era values. [3]
HTH, -Joe [1] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/Deprecated.html [2] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-6908218 [3] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/Deprecated.html
