[Biojava-l] biojava and Java version

[Spencer Bliven]

I see two reasons for using the @Override annotation: preventing errors in
the method signature, and documenting the subclass. In practice, most of my
@Overrides are added automatically by eclipse for method generation. In
this case, the method signature is known to be correct, and a @see javadoc
tag is automatically generated to document the connection with the
superclass. Thus, I would be fine with removing all @Overrides of interface
methods (which cause errors in 1.5), and probably with all @Overrides
entirely.

Are there any other ways we rely on 1.6? I don't think we're using the
compiler library or scripting language support. Most of 1.6 is just
back-end improvements.

In principle I agree with Steve about moving forward. However, it looks
like 1.7 will be impractical for some time (no easy OSX 10.6 support, for
instance). If we're not using any 1.6 features (besides interface
@Override) and we're not prepared to upgrade to 1.7, we should try to help
out users with only Java 5.

-Spencer

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Andreas Prlic <andreas at sdsc.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> After some discussions with a user I was reminded of the issue that
> there are some PowerPC based OSX systems that are locked into
> OSX10.5.8 . They can't upgrade their OS and they can't upgrade to Java
> 1.6 because none of these are available for PowerPCs. While that is
> not our fault, the question is if we should try to make BioJava
> backwards compatible towards 1.5.
>
> Anybody out there on such a system?
>
> Any opinions on making BioJava java 1.5 backwards compatible again?
> Essentially it means a global replace all "@Override" with ""
>
> Andreas
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