A diff [4] between the latest copies on the main branch and tck-jaxp-1_2_0 shows some other differences, most notably how the jaxp.properties file is cached. The code on the main branch will read and cache the jaxp.properties file once whereas on the tck-jaxp-1_2_0 branch it will reload it if the jaxp.properties file was modified since it was read (which to me appears to be a more desirable behaviour).