-Xpatch with jar, jimage, or other non-exploded format?

[Michael Rasmussen]

The usage of -Xpatch is to be a replacement for -Xbootclasspath/p, to
enable to patch boot CP classes, but at the moment it only seems to
support pointing to an "exploded" directory, containing the individual
.class files.

Are there any plans to extend this to also support some kind of container
format, for instance .jar or even .jimage?

For systems which relies on patching more than just a few classes,
exploded mode becomes rather clumpsy very quickly. The JVM is perfectly
capable of reading from these container formats, so why was the -Xpatch
option limited to exploded directory?

/Michael