Can automatic modules be made to work?

[Robert Scholte]

Yes, this option has been mentioned in some form.

The good thing about this part is that exports and requires use the same  
structure, i.e. the package is the unit shared between 2 modules.
However, this will probably lead to a long list of requirements, so I  
understand the choice the name of the bundle of exported packages, being  
the module name.

Also keep in mind that one of the fundamental choices made is that the  
module descriptor should not have mechanisms for migration path.
That said, one might think that the partial requirements or soft/loose  
modules are there also for migration. I would disagree with that. I expect  
that some jars will never become a module or will ever be re-released just  
for specifying a Automatic-Module-Name attribute, in which case you must  
refer to them as auto modules. In such cases you cannot talk about  
migration but about the fact that projects will always depend on  
unmodularized jars.
One solution was the soft/loose modules proposal which I think is valid  
but it all depends on the opinion if this "pattern" will be there just for  
migration or not.

Robert

On Fri, 05 May 2017 16:19:38 +0200, Robert J. Saulnier  
<robert.j.saulnier at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've only somewhat followed this discussion. The following might be
> nonsensical or already discussed.
>
> The issue with automatic modules is we don't know what the names of  
> future
> modules will be, but what we do know is what packages we require. So
> instead of guessing a module name, we could require package(s) until the
> actual module becomes available.
>
> module my.module {
>
>     exports ...;
>     requires ...;
>
>     requires package org.junit;
>     requires package org.junit.rules;
> }
>
> So in the above example, it would need to check if a module on the
> module-path exports the packages listed, if not, look in the Jar files  
> for
> the packages.
>
> Once Junit modularizes their stuff, we can update our module at our  
> leisure:
>
> module my.module {
>
>     exports ...;
>     requires ...;
>
>     requires <junit module name>;
> }
>
> Bob