The following was reported in the comments for bug 4056774. It is claimed
that "the readObject method of a Serializable class should be able to make
assigment to a blank final variable that is also transient", e.g. in the
example below:

import java.io.*;

public class BlankFinal implements java.io.Serializable {
  final Object var1;
  final transient Object var2;

  BlankFinal(Object arg1, Object arg2) {
    var1 = arg1;
    var2 = arg2;
  }

  BlankFinal(Object arg1) {
    this(arg1, arg1);
  }

  private void readObject(ObjectInputStream in)
  throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException {
    try {
      in.defaultReadObject();
    } catch (NotActiveException nae) {
    }
    var2 = var1;
  }
}

The compiler rejects this program, regarding the assignment to 'var2'
in 'readObject' as a duplicate assignment. This behavior is correct
according to the inner class specification.

It appears then that it is impossible to initialize transient blank
final fields when creating an object from a serialized stream. The
specification needs to clarify the interaction of 'transient' and 'final',
and perhaps forbid their combination, at least in the clase of blank finals.

william.maddox@Eng 1997-08-25