explicit serialVersionUID considered harmful?

Question

I am probably risking some downvotes on this.

It seems to me that explicitly specifying serialVersionUID for new classes is bad. Consider the two cases of not changi

Answer 1

Changing when it shouldn't may happen for reasons other than class layout changes - the problem is that it's compiler implementation dependent. If you do debug with Eclipse but do production builds with javac, you may end up with two incompatible sets of data.