JEP proposed to target JDK 11: 336: Deprecate the Pack200 Tools and API (original) (raw)

Peter jini at zeus.net.au
Sat Jun 16 10:32:54 UTC 2018

Hi Mark,

Might Oracle consider donating only the specification doc's and jtreg tests to Apache? We don't need the implementation.

I've started working on Emmanual's Pack200 implemetation from Apache Harmony, so far I've got it working and all tests passing with ASM6.2.
I'd like to get it up to date with the latest jvm bytecode features, the tests would certainly help, as it currently only supports java 1.5 and some 1.6 features. This implementation of Pack200 is modular, separable and should be relatively easy to maintain, external to the JVM. Perhaps Oracle / OpenJDK could retain the api within the jvm, but drop the implementation in a future release, we could use the existing provider mechanism.

Thanks,

Peter.

On 16/06/2018 12:23 AM, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:

2018/6/14 16:56:41 -0700, Emmanuel Bourg<ebourg at apache.org>:

...

Do I understand correctly that pack200 will be in JDK 11 but might be removed in a later release? Yes. If maintaining this technology is a burden for Oracle, could community involvement help reverse this decision? Possibly. As noted in the JEP, however, Pack200 is a complex and elaborate technology that’s tightly coupled to the class-file format and the JAR-file format, both of which continue to evolve. This isn’t a reasonably-separable component that can be maintained more or less at its own pace. If one or more non-Oracle contributors were to step up to maintain Pack200 then they’d need to commit to staying on top of it and participating in most every six-month feature release. - Mark

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