JEP 343: Packaging Tool

[Kevin Rushforth]

Andy is looking into a change which should satisfy the requirement to be 
able to produce an intermediate app-image (and later create a package 
from an app-image), while also getting rid of the two sub-commands, and 
making the building of the installer (package) the default.

The idea would be to get rid of the two sub-commands, making "jpackage" 
do what "jpackage create-installer" does today, and add the ability to 
create an app image as an alternative to a .deb, .rpm, etc.

Andy can provide more details, but I think this would be a good 
alternative without the need for two separate tools, which necessarily 
would share all of the code to build an application image.

He filed https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8225428 to explore this.

-- Kevin


On 6/6/2019 1:46 PM, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
> 2019/6/5 16:09:11 -0700, Alan Snyder <fishgarage at cbfiddle.com>:
>> I haven’t used recent versions of this tool, but I have found it
>> essential to be able to modify the image before the final package is
>> created. There is no way that this tool can anticipate all of the
>> custom configuration that might be needed, and I do not want to
>> duplicate its ability to create an image and to build a package from
>> the image.
> That’s a fair point.
>
> It does suggest, however, that perhaps this should be two separate
> tools -- one to create an OS-specific image, and another to create
> an OS-specific package.  They should work well together, of course,
> but it’s not clear that they need to be merged into a single tool.
>
> - Mark