New candidate JEP: 336: Deprecate the Pack200 Tools and API

[Kumar Srinivasan]

Hi Peter,

There are two parts to Pack200 (maybe three), what you looked at is
unpack200(.exe), a C++
native decoder or the unpacker, this is primarily used by the JDK
installers to break the
bootstrap, ie. the  chicken/egg problem.

FWIW, the complete coder and decoder implementations in Java  are available
at:
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/file/2f2af62dfac7/src/java.base/share/classes/com/sun/java/util/jar/pack

Hope this helps.

Regards
Kumar Srinivasan


On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 9:12 AM Peter Firmstone <peter.firmstone at zeus.net.au>
wrote:

> Hi Daniel,
>
> I had a look at the pack200 code in openjdk, it's written in c++, and
> looks a little painful to maintain.  I also had a look at Apache
> Harmony's implementation, written in Java, it uses the ASM byte code
> library and it's also already an OSGi Bundle.  It's still only at
> bytecode version 1.6, but it's going to be a lot easier to maintain in
> the long term.
>
> https://github.com/pfirmstone/pack200
>
> Cheers,
>
> Peter.
>
> On 13/06/2018 6:50 AM, Daniel Megert wrote:
> > pack200 is used by the Eclipse update manager a.k.a. p2. The JARed
> > plug-ins are compressed with pack200 and put into a p2 repository.
> > Removing pack200 will make the download (and hence install) of plug-ins
> > much slower. Eclipse would therefore like to keep this technology. If
> > that's not an option, then we would like that the removal does not happen
> > before Java 13.
> >
> > Dani
> > Eclipse PMC
> >
>
>