[jsr294-modularity-eg] Scope

[Peter Kriens]

As a matter of order, I'm having a bit of problem where we are ending  
up in the JSR 294 effort.
I made it very clear before we started that I was interested in the  
accessibility aspects of JSR 294; I fully supported Richard's proposal  
to focus on that hard nut instead of visibility. My motivation was  
mainly driven by Mark Reinhold's promise:

... Sun plans now to work directly with the OSGi Alliance so that a  
future version of the OSGi Framework may fully leverage the features  
of JSR 294 and thereby achieve tighter integration with the language.  
[1]

However, we seem now to have ended up at attempting to develop a  
module system in the Java language that happens to be Jigsaw in  
disguise. This is neither in the original scope of Jigsaw, nor JSR  
294. To quote Mark Reinhold on Jigsaw (underlining mine):

This effort will, of necessity, create a simple, low-level module  
system whose design will be focused narrowly upon the goal of  
modularizing the JDK. This module system will be available for  
developers to use in their own code, and will be fully supported by  
Sun, but it will not be an official part of the Java SE 7 Platform  
Specification and might not be supported by other SE 7  
implementations. [1]

And one only has to read [2], the superpackages blog that founded JSR  
294, that JSR 294 was focused on accessibility and left the visibility  
to JSR 277. This was confirmed in [3], and [4] from Alex when he  
introduced the module keyword.

Let's face it, defining the semantics of the module keyword already  
seems a daunting task enough, but at least achievable.

Kind regards,

	Peter Kriens

[1] http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/jigsaw
[2] http://blogs.sun.com/gbracha/entry/developing_modules_for_development
[3] http://blogs.sun.com/andreas/entry/superpackages_in_jsr_294
[4] http://altair.cs.oswego.edu/pipermail/jsr294-modularity-eg/2008-March/000171.html

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