Today I took the jpackage tool for another spin, using build
14-jpackage+1-64 from https://jdk.java.net/jpackage.
This looks much better! The simple command line
$ jpackage -p lib -m org.openjdk.hello -n hello
did exactly what I expected, and the resulting package installed (and
uninstalled) cleanly on an Ubuntu 18.04 machine.
A few suggestions:
- The image for the above example is large for such a trivial
application (122MB). That’s because you invoke the jlink tool with
the `--bind-services` option. To avoid surprise I suggest that you
not do that by default, and add a `--bind-services` option to
jpackage that’s just passed through to jlink (like `--add-modules`).
That will make jpackage work in the same way as jlink in this regard,
further reducing confusion.
- The sample usages in the help output are overly focused on
application images. I suspect that most developers will want to
start by creating actual packages, so consider reordering the
examples to put application packages first, followed by application
images and then runtime images. You could simplify these first
examples further by removing the `--package-type <type>` and
describing them as “Generate an application package suitable for
the host system”.
- Consider renaming the `--package-type` option to `--type`, with a
short-form option `-t`.
- Mark
