Hi All, Recently, there has been some discussion around the use of TinkerPop's Java libraries as a Java Module. My proposal is to not support this for now. The reason I feel this way is due to the fact that Java 8 will be supported for the foreseeable future. There are many dependencies of TinkerPop that don't support JPMS and would become automatic modules. I'm generally not in favor of this approach since I feel that it mostly defeats the purpose of the module system in the first place. I'd prefer that more of our dependencies became explicit modules first before converting our Java libraries into explicit modules.
A second related question that has come up is the issue with using TinkerPop's Java libraries as automatic modules. The same package is exported in multiple projects which causes split packages to occur when attempting to use TinkerPop in this way. This will require workarounds from the user to allow TinkerPop to be used as an automatic module. Although it can be argued that this change would be simpler to do than converting the project into an explicit module, I'd still be against doing this. My preference would be to either fully support JPMS or not support it at all. Changing package names also constitutes a breaking change which I feel the majority of our users would not benefit from. Unless there is strong demand from users or someone is willing to champion this change (implement and support) then I'd prefer to not support this for now. What are your thoughts on this subject? If there is no disagreement in the next three days then I'm going to assume lazy consensus and update the documentation accordingly to show that we don't support being used as a Java Module. Thanks, Ken
