Fwd: Why can modules not be annotated?

[Paul Benedict]

I am proposing a standard set of source retention annotations that
developers write and tools consume to build the module-info.java
automatically.

PS: This is a different issue than those who want to annotate statements in
module-info.java.

Cheers,
Paul

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:34 PM, <mark.reinhold at oracle.com> wrote:

> 2015/12/11 8:58 -0800, Paul Benedict <pbenedict at apache.org>:
> > Since we've already seen the creep towards generating the Module
> Descriptor
> > at build time, I think the area of tooling should not be neglected. Given
> > that Oracle wants one file to express the module declaration, that
> doesn't
> > mean Oracle can't help the tooling community by providing some standard
> > annotations.
> >
> > In particular:
> >
> > *) Create @javax.tools.Export annotation that is @Target(PACKAGE) and
> > @Retention(SOURCE) to avoid competing frameworks from providing their
> own.
> > This is going to happen if Oracle doesn't. Notice I am recommending it be
> > placed in "javax.tools" to indicate tooling support, and, it's discarded
> by
> > the compiler. The latter will prevent any confusion about it existing in
> > the binary.
> >
> > *) Allow annotations on the module to express the custom attributes that
> > you've spec-ed out.
> >
> > I advocate this as a happy medium. There are three wins in this proposal:
> > 1) The module declaration is fully self-expressible in one file (as-is
> > today)
> > 2) Tools have a standard way of generating the exports list from packages
> > 3) Tools have a standard way of customizing the module declaration at the
> > source level
> >
> > I would like the EG to consider my proposal for the sake of tooling and
> > automatic code generation.
>
> Can you please clarify exactly what it is that you propose?
>
> Do you want standard annotations in module-info.class files to repeat
> the information presently encoded in attributes in such files?  Or do
> you want annotations to replace those attributes?  Or something else?
>
> - Mark
>