Question

Thanks for the great answers about inheritance. Just one more quick question:

A subclass can always inherit the protected members of its superclass. Is that true even if they are not in the same package?

Answer 1

Yes, they can always inherit the protected members of its superclass regardless of the package they are in.

From the JLS Section 6.6.2,

A protected member or constructor of
an object may be accessed from outside
the package in which it is declared
only by code that is responsible for
the implementation of that object.

From the Java Tutorial,

The protected modifier specifies that
the member can only be accessed within
its own package (as with
package-private) and, in addition, by
a subclass of its class in another
package.

I think, this may be your required solution