question on jigsaw build

[Magnus Ihse Bursie]

On 2016-01-25 13:43, Maurizio Cimadamore wrote:
> Hi,
> the current build system in JDK 9 has a way to recover all the source 
> dirs for a given module, by doing something like this:
>
> $(call ALL_SRC_DIRS,$(mod))
>
> That is, the build system exports a function that can be passed a 
> module name and will return all the source roots for the module with 
> that name.
>
> This is an extremely helpful piece of functionality when building 
> things like IDE support - as one can leverage the knowledge of the 
> build system in order to put together an IDE projects with the right 
> paths in it, regardless of the OS and ARCH (details which are all 
> taken care of by the build itself).
>
> I see that this functionality is now removed from the current jigsaw 
> build - which instead declares a sequence of (dynamically defined) 
> targets to compile a module with name xyz; as a result, the variables 
> containing the source roots for xyz are not exported anymore, thus 
> severely impacting usability from 3rd party build tools.
>
> What is the plan in this direction? Is there any talks about having 
> the build system export a pseudo API for querying variables (source 
> roots, generated sources, output dirs) for a given module w/o 
> compiling them?

We can surely expose an API if there is such a need. However, it needs 
to be driven by an explicit need. Is there anything else you'd need 
apart from a list of all source roots for a given module?

/Magnus