Hi all,
pack200 is heavily used by p2 to reduce download size/time.
The big question is, if it's not standard any more, what are the possible choices and their pros/cons:
* Plan1: p2 contributors switch p2 to an alternative implentation of pack200
** Pros
*** No functional change
*** Still smaller download size/time
** Cons
*** Need to find a good pack200 un/compression engine (seems like a hard task), or to help one if getting good enough to be a substitute (slightly harder), or to author a good one (extremely harder); and help maintaining them on the long run (hard)
*** Adapt p2 to use a newer compression engine
*** overall, the 2 ones fail in the category "it's a lot of work".
* Plan2: drop pack200 from p2 on future Java
** Pros
*** relatively simple, p2 most likely has the switches to ignore pack200 already, so we can just configure those according to whether JRE ships pack200
*** sustainable and easier maintenance on the long run
** Cons
Plan 2 has the big advantage of requiring less effort. The big question is would
download.eclipse.org scale enough to serve non-packed artifacts?
And maybe other questions to discuss?
Note that for the architecture council, I think the right grain of discussion is mostly to evaluate whether dropping pack200 support would be a major issue or not.
For technical implementation details (p2 dynamically chosing pack200 or not according to JRE, considering other compression formats...), then the p2 bugtracker and mailing-lists are more appropriate.
Cheers,
