Specifically, we're turning off Eclipse warnings about missing version
constraints on required bundles ("Require-Bundle"), exported
packages ("Export-Package"), and imported packages ("Import-Package").
We're not turning these off absolutely everywhere, though: only in
packages where one or more such warnings were actually being reported.
So if a given package was already providing all version constraints
for, say, package imports, then we've kept that warning on in that
package.
Honestly I don't entirely understand the practical implications of
these warnings. However, there were 355 of them across many WALA
subprojects. I take this as evidence that the WALA developers do not
consider these version constraints to be important. Therefore, we may
as well stop warning about something we have no intention of fixing.
That being said, if we *do* want to fix some or all of these, I
welcome any advice on what those fixes should look like. I am rather
ignorant about all things OSGi.
Removing an unused field sometimes means removing constructor code
that used to initialize that field. Removing that initialization code
sometimes leaves whole constructor arguments unused. Removing those
unused arguments can leave us with unused code to compute those
arguments in constructors' callers, and so on. This commit tries to
clean all of this up, working backward from the unused fields that an
earlier commit already removed. Hopefully I have avoided removing
upstream code that had other important side effects, but it wouldn't
hurt for a WALA expert to review this change carefully.
Manu requested that we use this approach instead of adding
`@SuppressWarnings("unused")` at each affected catch block. That
seems reasonable to me, given the large number of such warnings and
the lack of likely harm from ignoring such caught exceptions.
These changes turn off Eclipse warnings for Javadoc tags without
descriptions. In some subprojects, we turn these off entirely. In
others, leave on missing-descrption checks for "@return" tags only.
We don't turn this warning off in all projects. Rather, we turn it
off only in projects that were producing at least one such warning.
In other words, if a project was already completely "clean" with
respect to this warning, then we leave this warning enabled for that
project.
Turning off these warnings is a partial declaration of Javadoc
bankruptcy. In an ideal world, we would enable and fix all of these
warnings. However, there are 576 of them. Apparently the WALA team's
implicit coding style says that omitting descriptions is OK. If
there's no intent to systematically add descriptions, then we may as
well turn off these warnings so that we can see other warnings that we
may want to fix.
In the cases addressed here, the caught exception was being "handled"
by throwing some new exception. Instead of discarding the old
exception, pass it to the new exception's constructor to indicate the
original cause of the newly-created exception. This practice, called
"exception chaining", can often be useful in debugging.
This fixes the remaining 34 Eclipse "Resource '...' should be managed
by try-with-resource" warnings that were still left after the previous
commit.
Unlike the fixes in that previous commit, the changes here are *not*
plugging potential resource leaks. However, in many cases that is
simply because the code before the close() call cannot currently throw
exceptions. If exceptions became possible in the future, leaks could
result. Using try-with-resource preemptively avoids that.
Furthermore, in code that was already dealing with exceptions, the
try-with-resource style is usually considerably simpler.
This fixes 33 out of 37 Eclipse "Potential resource leak: '...' may
not be closed" warnings. It also fixes 3 out of 37 Eclipse "Resource
'...' should be managed by try-with-resource" warnings, although that
was not the main focus of this effort.
The remaining 4 warnings about potential resource leaks all involve a
leaked JarFile instance that is passed to a JarFileModule constructor
call. JarFileModile never attempts to close its underlying JarFile;
this code is written as though JarFile cleanup were the caller's
responsibility. However, the JarFile often cannot be closed by the
code that creates the JarFileModule either, since the JarFile needs to
remain open while the JarFileModule is in use, and some of these
JarFileModules stay around beyond the lifetime of the code that
created them. Truly fixing this would essentially require making
JarFileModule implement Closeable, which in turn would probably
require that Module implement Closeable, which in turn would require
changes to lots of code that deals with Module instances to arrange
for them to be properly closed. That's more invasive than I'm
prepared to take on right now.
Instead, rely on Java's ability to infer type parameters in many
contexts. This removes 665 Eclipse warnings.
Note: a few of these changes are to files under "test" subdirectories.
Presumably those are files that serve as test inputs rather than being
part of WALA code proper. As far as I can tell, these changes do not
break any WALA tests. But if any of those tests were specifically
intended to exercise WALA on code with non-inferred generic type
parameters, then I really should be leaving those alone.
Some of these might have proper DTDs or XML Schema definitions
floating around somewhere that we could use. Presumably many do not.
Rather than hand-craft such definitions myself, I'm just giving each a
minimal stub DOCTYPE declaration. That's enough to satisfy Eclipse's
XML validator, which otherwise complains that these files lack grammar
constraints.
I think the "target/p2artifacts.xml" and "target/p2content.xml" files
are generated by Maven. They are well-formed XML but Eclipse's XML
validator legitimately warns that they lack grammar constraints.
Since we're not maintaining the tool that creates these files, we are
not in a position to do anything about that. Therefore, we may as
well exclude these from validation entirely. That way we can
more-clearly recognize warnings that we *can* do something about.
Ant "build.xml" files don't have a standard DTD or XML Schema; the
contents are simply too flexible for that. But we can at least
give each a stub DOCTYPE declaration. That's enough to satisfy
Eclipse's XML validator, which otherwise complains that these files
lack grammar constraints.
Most of the invalid HTML arose from bare "<" and ">" characters.
These should be escaped as "<" and ">" when not intended to
introduce HTML tags. When you have many such characters close
together, "{@literal ...}" is a nice, readable alternative that
automatically escapes its contents. If the text in question is
intended to be a code fragment, then "{@code ...}" is appropriate:
this is essentially equivalent to "<code>{@literal ...}</code>".
There were a few other HTML violations too, but none common enough to
be worth detailing here.
Eclipse validation warns about invalid HTML content in all
Maven-generated "target/site/dependency-convergence.html" files. The
warnings are legitimate: these HTML files are indeed invalid.
However, we don't maintain the tool that generates these files, so we
are not in a position to fix them. Better, therefore, to suppress
these warnings so that we can notice and fix other problems over which
we do have control.
In general, the WALA code base is not really ready for nullness
checking. It would be nice if we got there some day, but I'm not
planning to take that on now or any time soon. Until then, it's not
useful to warn about missing @NonNullByDefault declarations on WALA
packages.
See also older commit 7b6811b.
Eclipse Mars Service Release 2 finds 45 potential null pointer accesses
across WALA's various Eclipse projects. Eclipse ignores these by
default, but any individual user may have changed their personal Eclipse
configuration to treat them as warnings or errors. Thus, some people
will find that the code builds while others find that it fails. Better
to explicitly use a known-good configuration.
In the long run someone should inspect these cases one-by-one and fix
them where appropriate. But that is probably better managed as part of a
larger effort to tidy up nulls in WALA. I'm not planning to take that on
now or any time soon, though, so this is a better setup for now.
Manu Sridharan
Ben Liblit
Julian Dolby
Martin Hecker
Manu Sridharan
Andreas Sewe
Julian Dolby