Hi Pascal

As Mickael already mentioned, most of this has already been discussed on 
this list. The JEP itself explains why it got deprecated.

Dani



From:   Mickael Istria <mist...@redhat.com>
To:     P2 developer discussions <p2-dev@eclipse.org>
Cc:     Daniel Megert <daniel_meg...@ch.ibm.com>
Date:   19.07.2018 10:49
Subject:        Re: [p2-dev] FYI: Fw: New candidate JEP: 336: Deprecate 
the Pack200 Tools and API



Hi,

I'm putting some "guess" as answer here, but it's really not something 
that should be relied upon too strongly for decision making ;)

- Do we know why this technology is being deprecated?

According to the discussions we had earlier on this ML or another, pack200 
seems to be very hard to maintain these days. So I guess it's just 
deprecated in Java to focus development effort on some other pieces of 
Java which seem more profitable and get rid of a piece which has a high 
maintenance cost for a very arguable value.
By very arguable value, I mean that in the Java world, pack200 seems only 
used by the Eclipse ecosystem as an optimization. That means that if there 
is no pack200, everything would still work, just download server would 
face a 40%+ load.
Other dependency managers (Maven, Gradle) I'm aware of didn't really made 
the effort of optimizing jars for download size sake and it didn't prevent 
them to be successful and no-one really complained about it specifically. 
So it seems like pack200 optimization is not a criteria of success for the 
Java ecosystem and is probably not so worth keeping alive if the 
maintenance effort is huge.
- Would it be safe for us to keep our own implementation of pack200 like 
it has already been explored?
Given that OpenJDK team wants to drop it because it's a PITA to maintain, 
and given that it's not a criterion of success and given that users and 
extenders usually wants the Platform to focus on other things (perf, UX, 
Java support...); I think it would be a risk to assume we can safely 
maintain it with our current resources and simultaneously work on what the 
ecosystem would like us to work on.
That said, the proposal made earlier of having p2 bound to the Pack200 
Java API rather than the binary would be interesting, and if we have some 
guarantee a pack200 Java library gets implemented later and remain 
sustainable, let's just use it... as long as it's not extra maintenance.
- Do you know if there will be a replacement technology from the Java 
community, if not will there be another recommended technology?

IIRC, some optimizations are implemented in jmod format; but it's not 
meant to be used like we use pack200.

Cheers,



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