RFR: 8346669: Increase abstraction in SetupBuildLauncher and remove extra args

[Magnus Ihse Bursie]

On Thu, 19 Dec 2024 22:00:09 GMT, Erik Joelsson <erikj at openjdk.org> wrote:

> I'm not convinced this level of abstraction makes things better. It adds quite a bit of overhead for adding additional customization options for when adding new launchers. Could you elaborate more on why this is needed?

I could have been more clear at describing the end goal here. I have now opened https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8346719 for this. I have a prototype that implements the full functionality, with both the changes in this PR and the ones needed for JDK-8346719, but I thought it would be better to separate it into two steps -- one refactoring step of the existing code, and one adding the new functionality.

The core idea of JDK-8346719 is that we need to generate a command line to pass to the static java launcher. This means we need to know *what* the user is trying to accomplish with this particular launcher, not *how* they think it should be achieved. Even long before this became an issue for the static linkers, I still think this should have been done. We've worked hard to raise the abstraction level in the entire build system all the time, to describe the desired goal, not the assumed way of doing it. The fact that this was left out of JDK-8141444 all those years ago, was just due to lack of time back then. That change started doing this kind of abstraction level raising for the launchers, and then it has never been prioritized to be revisited, until now.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/22832#issuecomment-2557005793