RFR: JDK-8200132: Remove jre images and bundles

[Alan Bateman]

On 02/06/2018 08:05, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
> :
> Unfortunately, in the age of containers, distribution size matters. It makes the whole sense to ship
> JRE in Docker containers to provide the execution environment for the upper layers. Remember, hardly
> any application is fully modularized and/or uses jlink/jimage way of distribution.
>
> Also, products that ship with their own OpenJDK distribution (e.g. JetBrains IDEs) do ship with
> jres, which cuts down their distribution sizes.
>
> Cost savings for having JRE only are significant, as can be observed with current bundles:
>
>   178M Jun  2 08:53 jdk-11-internal+0_linux-x64_bin.tar.gz
>    38M Jun  2 08:53 jre-11-internal+0_linux-x64_bin.tar.gz
>
> Therefore, I believe removing jre is too disruptive, at least for 11, at least until we see that the
> whole jlink/jimage thing really works out in the wider Java ecosystem and JREs are really abandoned.
I don't disagree with the significance of what has been proposed here. 
However, just to point out that creating what used to know as the JRE is 
one `jlink` command. There is no requirement for the application or 
libraries using that run-time be developed as modules. Also incorporate 
generating of JDK run-time images into the build when working with 
containers is very useful as you get fine control on which modules to 
include.

-Alan