Project Jigsaw goals and requirements

[Tom Marble]

On 06/01/2011 03:55 PM, David M. Lloyd wrote:
> The two aren't mutually exclusive. [..] testing it in the modular environment is a different problem.
I understand.

> [...] If build-time version ranges are employed then it's possible that the maintainer of 
> widget could end up testing different classes, and ultimately be unable to reproduce the problem.
The idea of the range is, IMHO, that the underlying API semantics are
reliable. Are you really proposing updating the 'build-depends' graph
to *exact* versions for building (possibly with relaxing the versions to
become ranges at install and runtime)?

I see your rationale, but it (exact build dep versions) does sound
like a lot of work to maintain.  Are you using that approach now
for the Java related dependency graph of *.rpm's in Red Hat?

Separately you are probably the expert on RPM version syntax...
Can you point us to an authoritative grammar?  (A fair answer,
of course, would be to use-the-source of rpm).

Regards,

--Tom