David, Roger, Alan, thank you for clarifying all this, and sorry for my confusion.
I found describing jdk.lang.Process.launcMechanism especially problematic since to understand it one must understand the details of fork/vfork plus know the details of the underlying implementation of the libc. Using this feature with one libc is completely fine, with a different version may not be recommended. To distill that into a few lines for customers is difficult, especially if you do not want to lead them astray (in our port, we tend to not to mention diagnostic features with foot-shooting-opportunities :). But part of my confusion was that it was not clear what more was needed from me; but now I see the CSR (https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8214511) has already been approved by Joe. So all that is needed from me now is to finish the release note at https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8214454. I will do this presently. Thanks for all your help and explanations. ..Thomas On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 12:14 PM Alan Bateman <alan.bate...@oracle.com> wrote: > > On 05/12/2018 11:02, David Holmes wrote: > > : > > > > That said this particular property doesn't seem to actually be > > documented directly. No mention of it in the Process API that I can > > see. It seems a semi-secret means of influencing the implementation. > > So I can understand there can be some confusion here. > Documenting JDK-specific and platform specific configuration has always > been problematic. Many of the Sun era guides and documentation are dusty > now and aren't easy to find. We have used release notes in recent > releases but they aren't always easy to find either. With @implNote > descriptions, @index and more recently @systemProperty, they we have a > set of tags that should help put some of this JDK-specific documentation > into the javadoc. > > -Alan
