Packaging Proposal for OpenJDK

[Marco Vermeulen]

Hi there,

My name is Marco Vermeulen, and I'm the maintainer of SDKMAN!, an SDK
download and management tool. For those not familiar with the SDKMAN!
project, it is FLOSS tool which helps developers install and manage JVM
related SDKs conveniently on their development environments. We don't host
any binaries, we merely act as a broker on behalf of the user and help
manage their local path variables. It's sole purpose is to make developers'
lives easy! For more details, you can read up on what we do at our website
[1].

Recently, we introduced the ability to install platform specific binaries,
which finally opened the door for installing Java SDKs. Unfortunately, this
means that we are pointing to the Oracle JDK binaries since Oracle are the
only vendor providing single packaged JDKs for all mainstream platforms.

I would like to propose an initiative to start providing official OpenJDK
binary packages for the most used platforms across a version range (say 5.0
thru 9ea). I would suggest pre-packaged binaries for Linux, MacOSX,
Cygwin/Windows and FreeBSD. Currently, most developers use Oracle JDKs
because OpenJDK simply isn't available for their platform. This is very
sad, as we are missing a great opportunity in helping the adoption of the
OpenJDK!

It would probably require the JDKs to be packaged as zips and tarballs,
along with appropriate MD5 or SHA256 hashes for security purposes. I would
suggest publishing these binaries on a free platform such as BinTray.

On the tail of this I would love to see an automated publish of these
binaries to SDKMAN!, allowing users to easily install the JDKs with minimum
friction. The Groovy [2], Kotlin [3] and Ceylon [4] communities (amongst
many others) are already doing this, and it helps them greatly in
distributing their binaries.

If needed, I am willing to get involved with this initiative myself,
realising that much work would need to be done in order to automate such a
pipeline for building, packaging and publishing the OpenJDK.

I hope this sounds appealing to others, and we can get this happening
sometime in the near future!

Cheers,
Marco.

[1] http://sdkman.io
[2] http://groovy-lang.org/download.html#sdkman
[3] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/command-line.html
[4] https://ceylon-lang.org/download/
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