meeting regarding jpkg output

[Stephen J. McConnell]

On Fri, 2009-08-28 at 12:33 -0400, jon.vanalten at redhat.com wrote:
> 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?

Jon:

Assuming that Dependency, Export, Name, and Version are equivalent to
the notions of 'ModuleRequires', 'ModuleProvides',
'QualifiedIdentifier' (the module name), and 'ModuleVersion' as declared
in the Project Jigsaw: Language changes for Modules document [1], I
would suggest that the special character you are looking for is ','. If
I understand things correctly, the module name and version are treated
as opaque identifiers (<name>@<version) and a sequence of these opaque
identifiers are represented as <identifier>,<identifier>,...

Cheers, Steve.


> 
> cheers,
> 
> Jon VanAlten
> Man Lung Wong
> 
> 

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/doc/language.html

-- 
Stephen J. McConnell
mailto:mcconnell at dpml.net
http://www.dpml.net