Proposal to enhance jdeps tool to search split packages/add some kind of general API

[Jonathan Gibbons]

On 11/12/2015 06:49 PM, Mandy Chung wrote:
>> On Nov 12, 2015, at 2:39 AM, Patrick Reinhart <patrick at reini.net> wrote:
>>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I like to do some early adoption tests with software using the new module system. Now we got an unknown amount of split packages in our system, the we will need to fix in order to migrate our codebase.
>>
>> I could imagine, that there are other potential users of the JDK, that have the same problem to solve. So I think it would be a good thing to have some detection within the jdeps tool or even have some kind of an API that could be used otherwise (as of in a IDE).
>>
>> Now I wanted to know what you think about this? I would also be prepared to do some work in that area.
> A tool to detect split packages and some other characteristics to aid migration to modules would be useful.   I tend to think that belongs to a different tool that can build other additional analysis in it.
>
> For split packages, it’d be useful to differentiate if the split package contains overlapping classes vs partitioned classes.   For partitioned classes, renaming the package would likely be one solution if it doesn’t need to live in a specific namespace.  For overlapping classes, one possibility is that the class path contains multiple copies of the same version or different version or patched version of a library, or redistribution.
>
> Mandy

I think it would be good to have a "class path analysis tool" that can 
take a classpath, and report which packages are found in which entries 
on the classpath, and whether any packages are split between multiple 
entries, or whether any packages are completely by hidden by earlier 
entries.

-- Jon