Module-system requirements

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

2015/3/11 2:46 -0700, david.lloyd at redhat.com:
> On 03/11/2015 08:23 AM, David M. Lloyd wrote:
>> On 03/09/2015 03:56 PM, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
>>> ...
>>> 
>>> Either way, this use case suggests a new requirement for the Development
>>> section:
>>> 
>>> - _Annotation digests_ --- When packaging a module into an artifact it
>>> must be possible to augment its definition with a summary of all of
>>> the type- and package-level annotations that are present in the
>>> module, together with an indication of the types and packages to
>>> which each annotation applies.  This digest must be easily readable
>>> from module artifacts, and at run time those parts of it related to
>>> annotations retained for run time must be available through an
>>> appropriate reflective API.
>>> 
>>> Comments?
>> 
>> If we're looking to extend this into the domain of Java EE annotations
>> (for example), we'd also have to add method and field annotations to the
>> list.
> 
> Actually this is not true after all.  Other than possibly examining 
> constructor annotations to decide if a class is a CDI managed bean that is.

Do such constructor annotations really need to be in the digest?  Or
do such classes already carry class-level annotations to indicate
that they're to be managed by the CDI framework?

>> And SE 8 type annotations might add some strange color to this as
>> well.

Hrm.  I suppose we could summarize all the annotations in a module,
regardless of the kinds of elements they're applied to, but is that
overkill?

- Mark