Transcript for yesterday's IRC meeting

[Brian Pontarelli]

On Oct 23, 2011, at 1:58 PM, Alan Bateman wrote:

> On 22/10/2011 19:10, Brian Pontarelli wrote:
>> :
>> 
>> I'm also planning on using this list for additional discussions that might fall outside the scope of Jigsaw. Specifically, I want to discuss dependency management tools and standardization of dependency meta-data. This will apply for Java 1.7 and below.
> I think it would be good to establish relations with all these tools as JDK8 and modules is going to bring significant change. As has been mentioned on several other mails here recently, a JSR will be spun soon that will define the Java Module System and that will have to define how dependencies between modules are declared (and many other things). Whatever the details it will likely mean significant changes for tools (IDEs too) that want to support modules. For now all I can suggest to get started it to play around with Jigsaw and get a feel for what is there now. For example in the prototype then javac supports the module path layout and can compile modules with dependencies that are installed in a module library specified to the compiler. There is also very rudimentary support to allow module libraries be associated with repositories on the network where dependencies can be downloaded when installing a module with a main class. There are several things missing but it's good enough to try out.

I'll definitely try to grab the preview and play around with it inside a VM. Would be super-cool if there was one for Mac…

My initial thought with this sort of testing is that it is fun, but not likely to be useful or indicative of true development processes and production systems. I haven't executed javac directly in 8+ years, except for the random test main class here and there. I'd like to start discussions regarding how Jigsaw fits into the current landscape and what needs to be changed in the tools and in Jigsaw to make everything work well.

-bp