Proposal: #AutomaticModuleNames

[Brian Fox]

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 11:46 AM, <mark.reinhold at oracle.com> wrote:

> You wrote that it's impractical to block the publication of libraries
> that depend upon automatic modules, but it's not obvious to me why that's
> so.  A library is either modularized or not, and all of its dependencies
> are either modularized or not.  Version ranges in dependencies complicate
> the problem, but if we assume that once a library is modularized then it
> will remain modularized forever then it should suffice to check just the
> earliest version of each of a library's dependencies.  Is there some
> other complexity that I'm missing here?
>

It's more that central has many official, distributed entry points. Getting
all of those updated to enforce a new rule is not always practical. If
Central rejects it on ingest then this is problematic for the author as
they've half released something (released in their forge, nak'd in
central). People also tend to complain about the rules so this makes us the
bad guys and gives fodder for less stringent repos to advertise "easy".

In general this approach is a bit like putting the horses back in the barn
instead of trying to keep the door shut to start with.