Support for jrt-fs.jar in JDK 7 would be very helpful in allowing FindBugs to run under Java 9

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

2014/11/26 3:17 -0800, forax at univ-mlv.fr:
> On 11/26/2014 10:46 PM, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
>> ...
>> 
>> Exposing the package-to-module map via the NIO filesystem API is clean
>> and relatively simple.  It might be a little less efficient than using
>> a separate properties file, but I don't think utmost efficiency is the
>> ultimate goal here.
> 
> I understand that a plain old file is not something very flexible
> so ok to not having it.
> 
> and I think it's not a good idea to pollute the image API with
> something from the past.  I prefer that each tools that need the whole
> mapping between a package and a module to create their own index (not
> necessarily on disk) instead of choosing now to use symlinks to
> represent such index, something I'm sure we will regret in the future.

Why do you think we'd regret that in the future?

We're just talking about symbolic links in a virtual filesystem that's
being used to surface the data baked into a jimage file.  They're not
actual symbolic links in an OS-level filesystem.

Computing the package-to-module map at build time and storing it in the
jimage file is almost trivial.  It doesn't take up much space, and it
helps existing tools migrate to JDK 9.

In what sort of future scenario would we regret this?  It might become
less used over time, or even not used at all, but I'm hard pressed to
think of a situation where we'd consider it actively harmful.

- Mark