Java: RawType getASourceSupertype() is not generic type / getting source declaration or supertype is cumbersome

[Marcono1234]

It appears that for a RawType the result of getASourceSupertype() will not be the generic type. (This is also described by the getASourceSupertype() documentation.)

In addition to that there are the following issues:

• CodeQL raw types have a <> at the end of their name, therefore a check for the class name such as getDeclaringType().getASourceSupertype*().hasQualifiedName("java.util", "List") would not hold due to the trailing <>.
• Access of static fields and methods declared on a generic class, but only when explicitly using the declaring class as qualifier, are treated like accesses on a raw type (fieldAccess.getQualifier().getType() and methodAccess.getDeclaringType() will have a raw type as result).
  Whether that is the correct behavior might be a different story (now Java: Static method access with explicit qualifier on generic type claims declaring type is raw type #5593).

This all combined causes some false negatives for the pattern getDeclaringType().getASourceSupertype*() (which is also used a few times in the CodeQL codebase).
Is there a more 'correct' predicate for this task? A workaround might be getDeclaringType().getASourceSupertype*().getErasure().
If there is no alternative currently, would it make sense to change the behavior of getASourceSupertype() or introduce a new predicate?

[aschackmull]

These are good and difficult questions. The getASourceSupertype predicate was itself introduced to work around some similar problems and has mostly been doing its job. It would be nice to rework some of these things, but it's not clear what the right solutions are and how to get there without a lot of potentially breaking changes.

[github-actions]

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