Illegal Java generics and ticket #1263

Hi all,

First of all I would like to say that I don't generally like to bring
issues to the mailing list claiming them to be of crucial importance and
that the sky is going to fall if they're not fixed. As the story goes,
if the release team listened to everyone that had similar claims there
would never be any releases. Anyway, I will do so anyway (although it
took some prodding on IRC by David MacIver ;)).

As the subject implies, my problem is with ticket #1263[1]. It has
actually been fixed in trunk[2], but it hasn't been backported to the
2.7.2 branch and I have verified that 2.7.2-rc3 does not contain the
fix. I have tested that trunk does solve the problem.

So, this is not a case of having to fix the problem, all that is needed
is a backport. It is not clear to me why it hasn't been done. Was it
just due to a lack of time, or is it considered a potentially dangerous
fix?

The reason why I think the bug is so severe is that the illegal Java
generics signatures generated by Scalac cause frameworks that rely on
reflection to analyse methods to die with a
java.lang.reflect.GenericSignatureFormatError. This is a regression from
2.7.1 and effectively means that you can't use Scala classes as
dependencies in Spring beans if you don't want to run into runtime
exceptions (that you can't even easily predict). I find this very sad
because so much work has been done to improve Java/Scala
interoperability and this one issue makes it almost useless for some of
us and there _is_ a fix for it in trunk.