[jdt-core-dev] Concern about removal of unused import preferences

["Setera, Craig" <csetera@xxxxxxxx>]

I usually ignore most of the build noise in eclipse-dev, but happened to see the following yesterday:

The 2 test failures in jdt.ui.tests are due to the following change in
jdt.core:

      Compiler options for controlling the severity of problems for invalid
      imports or unreachable code got discontinued. Indeed, allowing this
      kind of problems to be ignored or treated as a warning would violate
      the language spec. As a consequence,
      JavaCore#COMPILER_PB_INVALID_IMPORT and
      JavaCore#COMPILER_PB_UNREACHABLE_CODE got deprecated, further
      attempts to set these preferences are now ignored and import problems
      or unreachable code are always reported as errors.

The jdt.ui tests will have to be changed to not use these options.

I'm extremely concerned about the removal of this preference from Eclipse.  The team I'm working on is in charge of porting a large Java application from one platform to another and adding certain feature enhancements.  The code that we receive to be ported is definitely not clean (in many different ways).  The codebase is filled with unused imports that up until now we have just ignored in those projects.  Removing this preference will most likely force my development team to be stuck on Eclipse 2.1.x for the foreseeable future.  It is unlikely that our vendor will respond to requests to clean up these problems and we can't afford to manage the merge processing from release to release if we clean these up ourselves to make Eclipse happy.

I apologize for not getting involved in any discussion that occurred prior to this change, but I didn't even know it was under consideration.  I'm wondering what the reasoning for this removal is and whether or not this change is set in stone?

Thanks,
Craig

Craig Setera
Master Software Engineer, SPSS, Rochester MN
Sun Certified Java Programmer, Developer and
Web Component Developer