RFR: 8372301: Improve error message for jimage command line tool regarding version mismatch [v3]

[Alan Bateman]

On Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:46:41 GMT, David Beaumont <duke at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> Adds a semantic reason for failure which can be optionally interrogated by calling code.
>> Use the 'Reason.BAD_VERSION' value to trigger a different translated error message from the JImageTask.
>> 
>> I would consider moving the error message string into the Reason enum to simplify the code triggering the error and avoid message string duplication, but it's not straightforward due to the need to supply the version numbers.
>> 
>> We can use this approach to provide translated messages for all the distinct failure reasons if needed.
>
> David Beaumont has updated the pull request incrementally with two additional commits since the last revision:
> 
>  - Redo bad indentation
>  - undo blank line

Roger's idea to use the release version seems a good idea but might be tricky to setup. That is, it might require some build foo as the source can't reference Runtime.Version or other APIs because it gets compiled `--release` for jrt-fs.jar. That said, not to say if it's worth it as the jimage tool is not documented so should be rare to have these mismatch issues.

On the current proposal: I don't particularly like having BasicImageReader.readHeader throw an IOException with a path to the jimage tool as this IOException may pop up in other contexts. I wonder if it could throw a more specific mismatch exception for this case so that the jimage tool can handle, and translate into something that includes a path to itself.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/28456#issuecomment-3739133289