Missing reification of the Module-path?

[Peter Kriens]

The proposal specifies how to resolve a module from a _module path_, a module path being one or more directories with modular JARs. 

Since the resolution is without versions, the module-path *must* contain a consistent set of artifacts. That is, the module path cannot be a repository like a maven repository it is closely bound to an executable since for each module only one of its versions can be chosen.

For example in maven the module path would consist of the transitive runtime dependencies. This is a unique set per application per version. I do not think it is practical to synchronize this set with other applications so one should assume this is unique and cannot be shared. It is potentially very large.

Ergo, the module-path *is* the application. 

I therefore wonder if there is a need for a reification of the module path + main class? Such an artifact could contain an indirection like a URL to not require creating temporary module path directories for each application with potentially very large duplicated artifacts.

Such an artifact could then be made available as an atomic Layer.