Hi there. I want to reanimate a discussion from 2007 [1,2] about the Assertion/System Assertion handling. As far as I know GNU Classpath can't distinguish between normal assertions (-ea/-eanableassertions) and assertions for system classes (-esa/-enablesystemassertions, i.e. classes with no classloader [3]). The only interface for the VM is the method VMClassLoader.defaultAssertionStatus(). It is not clear if this is supposed to return the system assertion status or the normal assertion status (vm integration doc [4] vs. javadoc [5]). On the one hand, it is used to set the defaultAssertionStatus for java.lang.ClassLoader [6] which would imply that it is the normal assertion status. On the other hand, the very same flag is used for setting the assertion status for system class in java.lang.Class (desiredAssertionStatus)[7]. I think we need two dedicated methods in VMClassLoader. getDefaultAssertionStatus() for normal assertions (i.e. -ea) and getDefaultSystemAssertionStatus() for system assertions (i.e. -esa). ClassLoader should use VMClassLoader.getDefaultAssertionStatus() as its default value and Class.getDesiredAssertionStatus() should use VMClassLoader.defaultSystemAssertionStatus() for system classes. I understand that this would be a rather big change because all VMs using GNU Classpath will fail if they do not adopt their VMClassLoader accordingly. I want to revitalize the discussion on this topic and I'm ready to prepare a patch for this issue but things should be discussed first ;). I hope my explanations are somehow understandable ;). - josef PS: I think the patch from 2007 is does not fix this issue as it does not modify java.lang.Class and java.lang.Classloader receptively. [1]: http://developer.classpath.org/pipermail/classpath-patches/2007-August/005601.html [2]: http://developer.classpath.org/pipermail/classpath-patches/2007-September/005605.html [3]: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/guide/lang/assert.html#enable-disable [4]: http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/docs/cp-vmintegration.html#SEC7 [5]: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/classpath.git/tree/vm/reference/java/lang/VMClassLoader.java?id=18f4bdd925d1a78d11598fb23dcaf1110772dcae#n334 [6]: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/classpath.git/tree/java/lang/ClassLoader.java?id=18f4bdd925d1a78d11598fb23dcaf1110772dcae#n220 [7]: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/classpath.git/tree/java/lang/Class.java?id=18f4bdd925d1a78d11598fb23dcaf1110772dcae#n1233
