meeting regarding jpkg output

[jon.vanalten at redhat.com]

Hello,

My name is Jon VanAlten and I am sitting here with Man Lung Wong.  We are interns at Red Hat and hope to contribute to the efforts of project Jigsaw wrt streamlining with the RPM process.

This is not intended as a full meeting synopsis.

Today we had a meeting as a follow-up to:
 http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jigsaw-dev/2009-July.txt

The main purpose of this meeting was to come up with a potential output format for the jpkg tool, when run with appropriate flags to emit module info rather than create a complete .deb/.rpm package.

It seems that the required module info consists primarily of key-value pairs, ie it is simple in nature.  The main bits that we are concerned with are:

Dependency  (possibly multiple)
Export      (possibly multiple)
Name
Version

Also mentioned was the possibility of including further information in the future, such as a copyright notice or other items.

So, after considering more robust formats such as XML, it was agreed that a simple shell script exporting environment variables (which can then be sourced by other tools later in the process) would be best.  Of course such a script would be encoded in a charset supporting international characters.

After the meeting we sat down to consider this solution, and realized that we do have something just a little bit more complicated than key-value pairs.  This is because the dependencies and exports of a jigsaw-based package may not be (in fact in most cases will not be) singular.  So we had the idea that a standard separator be used for these variables that may need to be assigned multiple values.  This separator should be a character that is not permitted to appear in the name of a dependency/export, and not conflict with any other special characters.  Dalibor, do you think this is a good idea, and if so do you have any suggestions, are there already any restricted characters for module names, or other possible future module info?

cheers,

Jon VanAlten
Man Lung Wong