Avoiding same-package conflicts

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 29 October 2015 at 13:48, Alan Bateman <Alan.Bateman at oracle.com> wrote:
> The restriction is that no two modules with the same package (irrespective
> of whether it is exported or not, or who reads the modules) can be mapped to
> the same class loader.

FWIW, I think that this could be a headache for module adoption.

Here are three cases that appear to be troubled by these restrictions:

- a large project that has taken an existing project (module) and
split it in two. In order to preserve backwards compatibility, the
author wants to retain the package names. But doing so is not
possible, because a single package now needs to be split across two
modules.

- extending a package scoped API from another project. While hardly
pleasant this is sometimes the only viable approach to get a task
done. As an example, the ImmutableList class from Google Guava has a
package scoped constructor. It is perfectly possible today for an
application to write a class that extends ImmutableList, so long as
that class is placed in the com.google.common.collect package. The
module system has the potential to block this extension point. (I
imagine that cglib and similar tools also generate code in other
peoples modules)

- where a stable interface is copied into two separate jar files to
avoid a dependency. An example of this was commons-beanutils where 4
interfaces were copied from commons-collections. While this has now
been changed, it was considered useful at the time, and given the
stability of the interfaces in question, caused no problems.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEANUTILS-379

FWIW, I'm most concerned about the first one going forward. However,
the other two are cases I've seen used, and if used broadly in the
wild could slow adoption (if it is hard to make those jar files
modular, and they are widely depended on).

Stephen