Re: [jakarta.ee-community] Help wanted: improved signature test tool

[Mark Thomas <markt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 14/02/2020 14:19, Andy Guibert wrote:
> Hi Bill,
> 
> When I was porting JSON-B TCK tests out of the JT harness I came across
> this topic. IIRC SigTest is part of the TCK because in the old days of
> JavaEE we didn't actually ship an API jar that implementations could
> include -- all of the implementations had to write up the API
> classes/interfaces themselves.
> 
> Nowadays all of the implementations just pull in the API jars from Maven
> Central and expose them in the runtime,

Not true. Apache Tomcat ships its own ALv2 licensed API JARs and I don't
see that changing any time soon.

> so SigTest doesn't really
> provide any testing value for implementations.

Because of the above, I disagree.

Mark


> However, SigTest can be useful for detecting API changes as specs
> evolve, particularly to make sure we follow semantic versioning rules in
> the API. For this, I suggest we use a maven plugin called
> "bnd-baseline-maven-plugin" [1]. This plugin essentially scans the
> produced API jar at build time and compares it to the previous version
> to ensure that semantic versioning rules are followed.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/bndtools/bnd/tree/master/maven/bnd-baseline-maven-plugin
> 
> --
> Andy
> 
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 7:38 PM Bill Shannon <bill.shannon@xxxxxxxxxx
> <mailto:bill.shannon@xxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> 
>     -- Background
> 
>     Part of our TCK test suites is a signature test that verifies that
>     the API
>     signatures of an implementation match what's expected from the
>     specification.
>     The signature test is based on a file that records the API
>     signatures.  The
>     sigtest tool [1] (part of the OpenJDK project) is used to generate
>     the signature
>     file base on a "reference implementation" - an implementation that
>     is believed
>     to exhibit the correct signatures.
> 
>     The recorded signatures include every field and method in every
>     class and
>     interface in the API, as well as the information for every superclass or
>     interface.  A consequence of this is that it records the signatures of
>     every JDK class used by the API.
> 
>     That means that a different signature file is needed to test an API on
>     JDK 12 vs JDK 11 (for example), even though the API works identically on
>     both.  There's no way to say "this API requires JDK 11 or newer".
> 
>     There are some features in the sigtest tool that seem like they should
>     work to limit the recorded signatures to only the API being tested, or
>     to exclude the signatures for JDK classes, but these features have never
>     worked the way I wanted them to work.  I've tried for years to convince
>     the sigtest team of what I wanted, but their perspective is that of
>     testing
>     the JDK itself, which obviously never has this problem.
> 
> 
>     -- Help Wanted
> 
>     I'd love it if someone in the Jakarta EE community could work with the
>     sigtest team, explain to them what's needed, and help them make the
>     existing
>     features work as needed, or create new features to do what we need.
> 
>     Worst case, someone could fork the sigtest tool and add the feature that
>     we need.  The obvious disadvantage of this approach is that the tool
>     would need to be kept up to date with every new JDK release.  We need
>     a long term solution, not a one-off solution.
> 
>     If you're interested, you should start by familiarizing yourself
>     with the
>     existing sigtest tool, try it out with a few APIs, then contact me
>     for more
>     background.
> 
>     Thanks for any help!
> 
> 
>     P.S.  I've filed a bug [2] against the platform TCK that can be used
>     to track
>     any work in this area.
> 
> 
>     [1] https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/CodeTools/sigtest
>     [2] https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/jakartaee-tck/issues/156
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