Open code review for 8061999 Enhance VM option parsing to allow options to be specified

[John Rose]

On Jun 23, 2015, at 7:50 PM, David Holmes <david.holmes at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> On 24/06/2015 3:43 AM, Ron Durbin wrote:
>> David,
>> 
>> The '-XX:Flags' option was considered during the research phase
>> of this project and was rejected because of its limitations. The
>> '-XX:Flags' option only works for boolean flag options and it
>> uses a different syntax for the options than the command line.
>> For example, '-XX:+UseSerialGC' would be specified as '+UseSerialGC'
>> in the '-XX:Flags' option file.
> 
> I'm a little surprised the Flags option wasn't extended to cover these additional requirements. But presumably it should now be deprecated as we (again presumably) don't want to have two mechanisms for doing this.

I thought the Flags option used to handle any command line options, and like David I'm surprised the right answer is to get rid of it and make a new option that does what I think the Flags option should be doing.

— John