RFR: 8221610: Resurrect (legacy) JRE bundle target

[Alan Bateman]

On 28/03/2019 09:07, Langer, Christoph wrote:
> Hi build-dev,
>
> today I’m coming up with kind of a backward oriented suggestion… don’t know how well that would be received. Let’s see.
>
> For JDK 11, with JDK-8200132 [0], the JRE build has been moved to legacy.
> There has been some discussion beforehand whether the JRE build can completely be dropped or how far one can go removing the support for it [1]. In the end the decision was made to at least remove the JRE from the main targets and only offer some “legacy” targets that would still build the JRE. Unfortunately, you were under the assumption that nobody except Oracle would use the bundle target and removed it as well [2]. Unfortunately, this assumption was not quite true (and I was not there to raise my concern ☹). In SapMachine builds, we use the bundle targets and we are also still building JRE images for several stakeholders. So it would really be good if we could get the JRE bundle target back. At the moment we mimick the bundling in a shell script that is run after the build.
>
I'm curious who these "stakeholders" are and what they use these JRE 
bundle for? As you know, moving to a modular platform has blurred the 
historical distinction between what we knew as the JRE and JDK in the 
past. Are they concerned about disk space?

-Alan