RFE to re-purpose option --version:<version>

[Alan Bateman]

On 10/08/2016 23:46, Martin Buchholz wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 11:52 AM, Paul Benedict <pbenedict at apache.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Martin, what do you have in mind when saying it's "broken"? Functionally,
>> everything is fine -- I can delete "release" locally without issue (so it
>> appears) -- so I imagine there's humor here I am missing? :-)
>>
> The release file is a user interface.  Removing it is just like removing
> any other part of the product (e.g. bin/javap) that users may have built a
> dependency on.  It's broken, just not totally broken!
Right, the `release` is a JDK-specific and supported interface. It has 
been there for several releases to allow tools inspect the image without 
needing to invoke `java -version`. Removing the release file seems 
misguided. Also something like `java --version:9.1` isn't going to work 
when the run-time image is for another OS/architecture, another use-case 
for the `release` file btw.

-Alan