Bug in BasicTabbedPaneUI Action keys?

Question

Can someone tell me if the following is a bug or purposeful behavior:
in jdk1.4.1 I map keystroke F5 to the BasicTabbedPaneUI action "navigateNext". This action eventually gets passed down to the navigateSelectedTab(int direction) method.
In the first switch statement, it does:
switch(tabPlacement) {
case NEXT:
selectNextTab(current);
break;
HOWEVER, tabPlacement is defined to be SwingConstants.TOP, in fact, NEXT isn't EVER even a valid value for the JTabbedPane tabPlace. This action class therefore won't ever do anything.
Lastly, I'd like to complain that all the action classes in BasicTabbedPaneUI are private. In fact, a lot of UI class methods are private when I'd really prefer to subclass them.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, that looks like a bug to me. The NEXT and PREVIOUS values are supposed to indicate the direction of navigation, not the placement of the tabs. They should either check for those values before going into the switch, or add them to the inner switches, after the tab placement has been determined.
Those two values were added to SwingConstants in jdk1.4, and it looks like someone screwed up retrofitting BasicTabbedPaneUI to use them. (This is exactly the kind of bug that typesafe enums are meant to prevent; too bad we had to wait until jdk1.5 for those.) Do you want to file the bug report, or should I?