Intersection of Modules and Multi-Release JARs

[Paul Sandoz]

Hi Paul,

A jar file can be considered a unit of release, and a modular-jar is no different in that respect e.g. either kind might have a maven pom and be published to maven central. The strong expectation is a unit of release has one set of dependencies.

Changing that expectation will i think cause problems for existing tooling and the JDK compile-time and runtime processing of modules. So i would prefer to keep it simple and mandate that a multi-release jar file has only one module-info.class at the root (such files located in a versioned area would be ignored).

Paul.

> On 13 Jan 2016, at 17:55, Paul Benedict <pbenedict at apache.org> wrote:
> 
> With multi-release JARs, there is a directory structure to partition out
> the class files for the destined versions of the Java runtime.
> 
> With modules, the module-info.class sits in the root of the JAR.
> 
> How will these two requirements be reconciled? Are there plans such as
> allowing module-info.class in each version folder too? It is quite
> conceivable a module will require dependencies in one Java version; yet not
> for another.
> 
> Cheers,
> Paul