8296183: jndiprovider.properties contains properties pointing to non-existing classes

[jaikiran]

Can I please get a review of this change which removes the unused src/java.naming/share/classes/com/sun/jndi/ldap/jndiprovider.properties file? This addresses the issue noted in https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8296183.

This jndiprovider.properties file lists 3 properties java.naming.factory.control, java.naming.factory.object and java.naming.factory.state. The semantics of these environment properties are explained in https://docs.oracle.com/javase/jndi/tutorial/beyond/env/provider.html. The classes configured in com/sun/jndi/ldap/jndiprovider.properties for each of these properties are non-existent in the JDK. Looking at the version control history of the JDK, these classes haven't been around for several releases (not even in JDK 8). The jndiprovier.properties gets looked up by an JDK internal class in the java.naming module - com.sun.naming.internal.ResourceManager. The ResourceManager.getFactories(...) method is the one that gets called to load the classes configured for those 3 environment properties. The javadoc of ResourceManager.getFactories(...) says this:

Retrieves an enumeration of factory classes/object specified by a property.

The property is gotten from the environment and the provider resource file associated with the given context and concatenated.
... The resulting property value is a list of class names.
This method then loads each class using the current thread's context class loader and keeps them in a list.
Any class that cannot be loaded is ignored.
...

The implementation of ResourceManager.getFactories(...) matches that javadoc. Because the implementation ignores such missing classes, the reference to these non-existent classes in the com/sun/jndi/ldap/jndiprovider.properties has gone unnoticed all this while. Manual experiments of exercising this code path does indeed show that a ClassNotFoundException gets raised (and ignored) for the classes referenced in that jnidprovider.properties file.

The commit in this PR removes the jndiprovier.properties. It also removes a javadoc reference to one of these non-existent classes. Given the nature of the change no new tests have been introduced and the existing tests in tier1, tier2 and tier3 continue to pass.

---

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Issue

• JDK-8296183: jndiprovider.properties contains properties pointing to non-existing classes (Bug - P4)

Reviewers

• Daniel Fuchs (@dfuch - Reviewer)
• Aleksei Efimov (@AlekseiEfimov - Reviewer)

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@jaikiran This change now passes all automated pre-integration checks.

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8296183: jndiprovider.properties contains properties pointing to non-existing classes

Reviewed-by: dfuchs, aefimov

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At the time when this comment was updated there had been 2 new commits pushed to the master branch:

• 486ff5d: 8377455: Replace LinkedList with GrowableArray in VM.ThreadDump's OMTable
• 4e7106d: 8377035: [s390x] Disable JSR166 test cases which uses virtual threads

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[dfuch]

Generally looks good to me. Good to avoid those unneeded CNFE. If backported, some more checks might be required on JDK 8 - as CORBA is still supported there.

[dfuch]

Not that it matters much, but I see that DefaultResponseControlFactory and PersistentSearchControl both have an @see EntryChangeResponseControl so I'd suggest to replace:

-  * @see com.sun.jndi.ldap.ctl.ResponseControlFactory ResponseControlFactory
+  * @see DefaultResponseControlFactory

[jaikiran]

That's a good point, I've updated the PR accordingly.

[dfuch]

Would be good to get @AlekseiEfimov approval before integrating.

[AlekseiEfimov]

Looks good to me

[AnirvanSarkar]

Looking at the version control history of the JDK, these classes haven't been around for several releases (not even in JDK 8)

It seems these classes were never part of the JDK.
These classes were part of the (legacy?) JNDI/LDAP booster pack ldapbp.jar available as a separate download.
The download file is currently ldap-1_2_4.zip in the Oracle Java Archive for Java Platform Technologies [1].

Software vendors required ldapbp.jar to be added to the CLASSPATH.
The very old JNDI tutorial also references ldapbp.jar [2].

Booster pack has the following packages:

Package	Contents
com.sun.jndi.ldap.obj	RMI, CORBA support for LDAP Service Provider for JNDI
com.sun.security.sasl.misc	CRAM-MD5, Anonymous, and Plain SASL Drivers
com.sun.jndi.ldap.ctl	Controls for LDAP Service Provider for JNDI

The packages com.sun.security.sasl.misc and com.sun.jndi.ldap.ctl became obsolete when its support was included in the JDK 5.

I suspect the classes of package com.sun.jndi.ldap.obj were not included in JDK, as RFC 2713 & RFC 2714 were not standardized unlike other RFCs related to LDAP.

The booster pack is also available on Maven repository [3].
Do you think any of its dependencies could be impacted by removal of jndiprovider.properties file?
Should this removal be mentioned in the release notes?

If you want to look at the booster pack’s source code, it’s included in GlassFish 5 [4].

[1] : https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/java-archive-downloads-java-plat-downloads.html#7110-jndi-1.2.1-oth-JPR
[2] : https://docs.oracle.com/javase/jndi/tutorial/objects/storing/index.html
[3] : https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.sun/ldapbp
[4] : https://github.com/javaee/glassfish/tree/master/appserver/ldapbp/src/main/java/com/sun/jndi/ldap