Hi, first of all I want to thank Patrick Beard for placing his jlink code under the Apache license (or allowing it to be placed).
I've made that task an optional task (given its location and documentation) although it can - and in fact will - be built on any platform. IMHO there are already too many tasks in the built-in area, that's why I've put it there, I didn't want to say its merits would be smaller than that of any other task. I'd like to see a separate discussion on the issue of built-in versus optional once we have a extension mechanism in place. <jlink> provides a superset of functionality over <jar> as far as I can tell and it doesn't rely on any external libraries/classes/executables either. We shouldn't try to duplicate this functionality (adding files to existing .jar files for example) in <jar> IMHO. Let's keep <jar> the simple solution that fits most situations and point people to <jlink> in the more difficult ones. Stefan
