I've been thinking about how we can have the metamodel API in place in time for the 4.0.0.beta1. One alternative is to use a fully built o.h.cfg.Configuration to provide the data for generating the new metamodel. This is obviously not what we would want in the end, but in the near term it would give us the data with everything already resolved. It would be available sooner so Steve could get going more quickly on building the SessionFactory/persisters. I've thought of 2 ways we could use the Configuration: 1) create a separate type of metamodel source for Configuration data (e.g., org.hibernate.metamodel.source.configuration) and use data from this source to generate the metamodel. 2) use Configuration for binding missing data (what we haven't finished) from annotations and hbm sources; as more data is available, we can remove the references to Configuration. Comments? Gail