[kaffe] Re: GregorianCalendar fixes

[Andrew Haley]

Stephen Crawley writes:
 > 
 > I don't understand what you are saying here.  We are not building Mauve
 > tests in order to validate Sun's implementation.  Rather, we are
 > building it to check that other implementations (including Classpath)
 > conform to the accepted specification for Java.  The ultimate
 > specification for Java is (according to Sun) the behaviour of Sun's
 > reference implementations.

No, it isn't.  Java isdefined by a specification, not by a reference
implementation.

In the past we have had attempts to change Mauve testcases to conform
to bug in Sun's implementation, rather than their specification.  This
is a mistake.

 > Are you suggesting that there is a more appropriate or more definitive
 > specification of Java?  If so, what is it, and why is it more
 > appropriate or definitive?  

We need to separate our concerns here.  When there is a conflict
between specification and implementation, we go with the
specification, unless there are good compatibility reasons to do
otherwise.  If we do it the other way around we risk testing for
compatibility with Suns's bugs, which they will fix in future
releases.

Andrew.