Annotation Dependencies and Requires Static Transitive

[Anand Beh]

Hello,

The cache library Caffeine recently added a full module descriptor. It
has no runtime dependencies, but it depends on metadata annotations
from checker-qual and errorprone, for example @NotNull and
@CanIgnoreReturnValue. The module looks like this:
module com.github.benmanes.caffeine {
  exports com.github.benmanes.caffeine.cache;
  exports com.github.benmanes.caffeine.cache.stats;

  requires static transitive com.google.errorprone.annotations;
  requires static transitive org.checkerframework.checker.qual;
}

The annotations are not required at runtime, hence static. They're
visibly placed on public methods and return types, so that API clients
can benefit from them for the purposes of annotation-based null
analysis, kotlin interop, etc. As the annotations are part of the API,
they're marked transitive.

However, the "transitive" aspect imposes some requirements on users. I
am wondering if there is a more correct way to declare these
annotation dependencies than static transitive.

One user would like to avoid the presence of these annotations at
compile-time. For reference, here's the relevant discussion:
https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine/issues/535

I'm not a maintainer of caffeine, though I was involved in its modularization.

Regards,
Anand