Prototype: more extensible and human-readable module metadata

[Glyn Normington]

I objected to requirement [2] on jigsaw-dev back in June 2011 (twice, and again in August, with no response) because it states:

"The syntax must place all extended metadata after all standard metadata, with a clear delineation between them."

which is poor for decorating Jigsaw metadata with OSGi additions as David has already pointed out a number of times and now again.

I'm pleased that the point is finally being discussed, but I haven't yet heard an argument for keeping the standard and extended metadata sequentially separated.

Surely the requirement should simply say that it has to be clear what is standard and what is extended metadata? There are a number of ways of implementing that restated requirement, but lumping all the standard metadata together separately from the extended metadata doesn't seem like an elegant solution when the OSGi interoperation requirement is also taken into account.

Regards,
Glyn

On 23 Mar 2012, at 14:37, David Bosschaert wrote:

> On 23 March 2012 13:54, Alan Bateman <Alan.Bateman at oracle.com> wrote:
>> On 23/03/2012 07:43, Shi Jun Zhang wrote:
>>> 
>>> :
>>> 
>>> Here is the commentary on module-metadata formats [1] for your reference
>>> if you have not read it. Also there is a requirement of extensible module
>>> declarations[2] in that document, but it seems has not been implemented yet.
>> 
>> It's been there for a long time, anything after the final "}" will be passed
>> through by the compiler to the ModuleData attribute.
>> 
>> -Alan
> 
> The problem with that is that it is out of context. For example, in
> OSGi version numbers are assigned to exported packages. Having that
> version information separate from the actual exports is inconvenient,
> causes a lot of duplication (the exported packages will need to be
> repeated for the version information) and error-prone (the info may
> get out of sync).
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> David