Unfortunately, we need to bag this proposal for a year or two.
Magic will remain 1.4 compatible for quite some to come.
Merlin still has a 1.3 compatibility ambition, but we are likely to up to 1.4
"soon".
I can't see that you can maintain that at the same time as your proposal.
Furthermore, we also need to maintain compatibility with existing tag set and
its syntax.
Love to hear if you manage to sort out all of that.
Well, actually this would just be an *alternate* way of specifying meta informations. The processor does nothing more than the current plugin does: Generate some XML files. Of course, a component that uses annotations will need to be compiled with a Java5 compiler and therefore must run in a Java5 environment. But people who want to use the old system can continue doing so.
I myself currently use two systems: "Classic" avalon-meta for components I don't want to lift to Java5 (yet), and manually maintaining xinfo files for components that are targeted to Java5.
And, as a spontaneous idea, it could even be possible to compile components using annotations in a way that still allows to use them in a 1.3 environment, although this would seem a bit hackish. :)
You can invoke apt with the -nocompile flag to generate the files only without compiling anything. The problem here is: The annotations are still present in the sources and a 1.3 compiler wouldn't like them very much. To work around this, the processor could furthermore generate new Java sources with the annotations filtered out. Afterwards, use a Java 1.3 compiler on that output. As I noted, hackish, but theoretically possible ...
cu, Raffi
-- raffael herzog software engineer
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