Converting plain JARs to Java modules

[Sangjin Lee]

Translating maven POMs into module dependency information is not quite the
same as generating it based on the bytecode in my view. We're well too
aware that most of the POMs do not contain correct (direct) dependencies
for this to be accurate. The generated module dependency information would
be as good as the underlying POMs, which is generally not so good.

Generating OSGi manifests using package-level dependencies can be very
accurate, and does not depend much on user input. Furthermore, it is a
local operation.

Regards,
Sangjin

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 2:32 PM, <mark.reinhold at oracle.com> wrote:

> 2011/11/7 1:47 -0800, gnormington at vmware.com:
> > ...
> >
> > In case it's not obvious, please note that support for package level
> > dependencies would permit a fully automatic conversion because it would
> > then not be necessary to know the module name corresponding to each
> > package dependency.
>
> Yes, I think we understand that.
>
> >                     A fully automatic converstion could be particularly
> > useful in automatically serving up modularised versions of existing
> > JARs, e.g. in a front end to Maven central.
>
> Maven POMs already contain what is, essentially, module-level dependence
> information, so the value of package-level dependences for that case is
> far from clear.  Alan has prototyped a tool which constructs a Jigsaw
> module declaration from a POM; it works well, at least for simple cases,
> though there does seem to be a lot of noise in the POMs published on
> Maven Central.
>
> - Mark
>