Technical question about the Java Dependency Analysis Tool

[Richard Callahan]

Hi,

I have a specific question about the output from the Java Dependency Analysis Tool (JDeps), released with Open JDK 8. Thank you very much for such a marvelous tool!

I am parsing the output from JDeps with the "-v" flag set, such that a call to JDeps produces all class-level dependencies among and within a set of JAR files in a directory specified by the user. Consider a directed graph G constructed from the JDeps output, with the vertices representing nodes in the graph and the edges representing dependencies among the classes as specified in the JDeps output.  My question is, if a specific JAR file in the directory (call it A.jar) can compile using OpenJDK with the other JAR files in the directory designated as dependencies, then does there always exist at least one subgraph G' of G that corresponds to the dependency relationships that would be actually used by a Java compiler to compile A.jar? If the answer is "yes," then I believe I should be able to recover that graph by starting with the set of classes in A.jar and then constructing the subgraph G' in a manner similar to that used by a depth-first search.

Thank you for your time, I recognize it is valuable.

Best,

Richard