[hibernate-dev] Null vs "empty" embeddable values

As of HHH-7610, Hibernate is supposed to treat null and empty embeddable values as equivalent. Should we add a requirement that an embeddable class #equals and #hashCode methods also treats null and "empty" values as equivalent? That would mean that #hashCode returned for all empty embeddables should be 0, and embeddableValue.equals( null ) should return true for all empty embeddableValue. BTW, I've already pushed a fix for HHH-11881 so that nulls are not persisted for Set elements (they already were not persisted for bags, idmaps, lists, or maps). I'm holding off on fixing HHH-11883, which would no longer persist empty embeddable values and would ignore embeddables with all null columns when initializing collections. I don't think JPA has any such requirement, and I'm hesitant to enforce something that may be at odds with JPA. Comments or opinions? Thanks, Gail