javapackager feedback and questions

[Martijn Verburg]

Hi Victor,

I can answer the last Q.  It's for two products, one is Censum our GC Log
analyser (Java swing desktop app, yes they still exist! ;p) and the second
is a stand alone Java 'daemon' for our APM SaaS tool (illuminate).

jlink and javapackager is a powerful combination for us, so thanks for
these tools!

Cheers,
Martijn

On 29 November 2017 at 23:18, <victor.drozdov at oracle.com> wrote:

> Hi, Mani.
>
> Thanks for providing the feedback!
> We will consider adding more examples and more details in the docs as you
> proposed(there is an arg named jvmOptions but that's not mentioned in the
> table).
> Looks like there is a bug when you specify systemWide=true on the MacOSX
> in non-gui mode. Can you provide more details about that (like full cmd
> line)?
> Actually, if you want you can clone the repo:
> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/openjfx/10-dev/rt/
> (hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/openjfx/10-dev/rt/)
> and help to improve javapackager. Or you can just create Enhancements for
> deploy/packager, as it's not always clear what users expect.
>
> By the way, what kind of apps you distribute using javapackager? Is that a
> UI app or services?
>
> --Victor
>
>
>
> On 11/29/17 3:48 AM, Mani Sarkar wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> First I hope I'm writing to the correct mailing list, if not please
>> suggest
>> where to write instead. Also if it is worth writing back as separate
>> messages per issue or item, please do let me know.
>>
>> Some of my observations and feedback when using *javapackager*:
>>
>> *Positives*
>> - .dmg and .msi packaging work very well out of the box, easy to put
>> together configuration settings
>> - .rpm packages build very quickly
>> - a number of features from FPM (docs
>> <https://fpm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/> | GitHub
>> <https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm>) available but some more for the
>> individual types of packages would certainly help (for e.g. exposing some
>> more of the CLI flags for DEB and RPM packaging)
>>
>> *Improvements*
>> - [doc and example required]: Additional documentation and examples around
>> how to add a license when building a package would be helpful. After a bit
>> of searching on google and experimenting with couple of combinations of
>> CLI
>> options I was able to figure it out.
>> - [doc correction]: jvmUserArg is referred to in the documentation with
>> examples, while in the usage documentation jvmOptions is used (discrepancy
>> between the names of flags), see
>> https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/unix/
>> javapackager.html
>>   and
>> https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/deploy/self-contained-
>> application-packaging.htm#JSDPG585
>> - [doc correction]: same goes for mac.signing-key-user-name while there is
>> no mention of it in the javapackager usage documentation, it takes the
>> full
>> name of the user i.e. *Jane Doe*
>> *- *[doc and example required]: just adding
>> mac.signing-key-developer-id-app=xxxxx isn't enough, needs the other
>> code-sign related flags as well, possibly key should be in the Mac
>> KeyStore
>> when building it (check if id provided is the correct one, additional
>> examples would definitely help to reduce or eliminate experimentation and
>> assumptions)
>> - [potential bug]: Using *-B*systemWide=true flag causes error -10810 when
>> building on the MacOSX in non-gui mode, can be overridden by using the
>> -Bmac.dmg.simple=true but we loose the backdrop and automatic shortcut
>> creation, etc... Swappin gthe order to: -Bmac.dmg.simple=true and *-B*
>> systemWide=true does not help, still ends up building a .dmg package with
>> just the app in it (no icon, no background)
>> - code signing examples for Windows and MacOSX will certainly help quite a
>> bit
>> - [doc and example required] .deb packages take a long time to build, some
>> additional flags that can help. Some findings along the lines on how to
>> speed up dpkg-build:
>>
>> export CCACHE_DIR=/home/$USER/.ccache
>>
>> export CCACHE_HASHDIR=$CCACHE_DIR
>>
>> export DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="${DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS}
>> --preserve-envvar=CCACHE_DIR
>> --prepend-path=/usr/lib/ccache parallel=jobs"
>>
>> echo "Debian build options: ${DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS}"
>>
>> -------------------------------
>>
>> A response with answers for the above will be highly appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Mani
>>
>
>