Call for Discussion: MSI installer for Windows

[Alex Kashchenko]

Hi,

I would like to open a discussion about possible addition of an MSI
installer as an additional OpenJDK build artifact on Windows.

The intention is to add two new build targets:

"make installer-msi": produces a vanilla upstream MSI installer from a JDK image

"make installer-msi-xml": produces an installer description as a
single XML file that can be used by OpenJDK vendors to create extended
installers based on a vanilla one


Longer description, a draft text for a possible JEP and a full
implementation (as a single squashed commit) is available in
"installer-msi-jpackage" branch in this GitHub repository:

https://github.com/akashche/jdk/tree/installer-msi-jpackage/make/data/installermsi/doc


Current status: implementation of both targets works with the latest
openjdk/jdk master and includes a test-suite.
It currently includes a number of MSI features hardcoded into the
custom template passed to jpackage tool. It is intended
to contribute support for these features to the jpackage tool itself
and to completely remove custom template before
proposing the change for integration into JDK.


Dogfooding: earlier version of this implementation is used to produce
Red Hat OpenJDK 17 Windows installers.


About the author: Alex Kashchenko (Kasko, census id: akasko) is an
engineer working on OpenJDK Windows builds at Red Hat since 2015.

-- 
-Alex