CORBA34 — Unclear and possibly harmful consequences of mandatory annotation definitions

The current mandatory annotation definitions (7.4.15.4.1) will cause problems when IDL specifications are attempted to be reused between profiles applying different requirements concerning annotations (for example a profile with annotations and a profile without annotations or two or more profiles with different sets of annotations).

As the IDL 4 specification has removed the support for the commented form of annotations there is no possibility anymore to declare annotations in a form that has semantic meaning in one profile and does not cause parsing errors in another profile not supporting (these) annotations.
Even with the commented form supported the mandatory specification of annotation definitions for applied annotations would cause similar kind of problems as it is likely that the definitions for the standard set of annotations from one profile would not be available in another profile not supporting those annotations.

Personally I do not see any use for annotation definitions (and in fact I cannot find any commentaries regarding that in the spec) but I would suggest that at the very least IDL compilers should be allowed to ignore any annotations not known to the profile for which the IDL compiler is configured.
Ideally I would like to see a specification without any mandatory annotation definitions leaving it up to the tool supplier to enforce annotation definitions or implement implicit (embedded) definitions.

Deferred

This proposal was generated automatically by request of the Task Force Chair Adam Mitz.