VirtualMachine in tools.jar

[Alan Bateman]

On 25/08/2015 03:54, David Holmes wrote:
> On 25/08/2015 1:04 AM, Henri Tremblay wrote:
>> Does the absence of answer means that this subject was never raised 
>> before?
>>
>> Or that it is considered of no interest?
>
> More likely that there are a number of factors involved and the right 
> people may not be monitoring this particular list closely. Once the 
> modular image comes along (as part of Jigsaw) tools.jar will be gone. 
> Asking on core-libs-dev or serviceability-dev may get more of a response.
If I understand Henri's mail correctly then he is advocating that the 
attach API be included in the JRE builds. The attach API was developed 
as an API for tools so this is why it has always been in the JDK builds 
and not the JRE builds. Maybe there are new use-cases now that mean it 
should be re-examined but it's not clear from the original mail. In 
general, there are many interesting tools and tool APIs in the JDK 
builds that might sometimes be useful in environments that only have a 
run-time installed so I guess a similar argument could be made for those 
too.

Henri - for you build environment then you you might want to look at the 
top-level make/Images.gmk as that is the make file in the current JDK 9 
builds that configures which modules go into the JRE and JDK builds. I 
see tools.jar was mentioned in a few of the mails but that has not 
existed in JDK 9 builds since the integration of JEP 220 in late 2014. 
Once the module system comes along (there should be builds with this any 
day now) then there will be a linker tool that will allow you to create 
run-time images that include the modules that you specify (along with 
their transitive dependences) so this may be something to try out.

-Alan