Further comments on jpackage (JEP 343)

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

Today I took the jpackage tool for another spin, using build
14-jpackage+1-64 from https://jdk.java.net/jpackage.

This looks much better!  The simple command line

  $ jpackage -p lib -m org.openjdk.hello -n hello

did exactly what I expected, and the resulting package installed (and
uninstalled) cleanly on an Ubuntu 18.04 machine.

A few suggestions:

  - The image for the above example is large for such a trivial
    application (122MB).  That’s because you invoke the jlink tool with
    the `--bind-services` option.  To avoid surprise I suggest that you
    not do that by default, and add a `--bind-services` option to
    jpackage that’s just passed through to jlink (like `--add-modules`).
    That will make jpackage work in the same way as jlink in this regard,
    further reducing confusion.

  - The sample usages in the help output are overly focused on
    application images.  I suspect that most developers will want to
    start by creating actual packages, so consider reordering the
    examples to put application packages first, followed by application
    images and then runtime images.  You could simplify these first
    examples further by removing the `--package-type <type>` and
    describing them as “Generate an application package suitable for
    the host system”.

  - Consider renaming the `--package-type` option to `--type`, with a
    short-form option `-t`.

- Mark