Ship an embedded Jvm or installer

[ulfjack]

We've gotten feedback that the dependency on Java makes it unnecessarily harder to install Bazel, and we should consider if bundling a Jvm or triggering a Jvm install from our installer would be workable options. What are our options here?

[damienmg]

Adding Helen also, I think we also need to evaluate the benefit of doing so.

I am pretty sure we can do it with putting an engineer one month on it. The underlying maintenance is less clear. Probably around 1 day per Java update (so a day per month I would say) is a big overestimation.

I'd rather we work on that if that's higher priority that other thing. We agree it is nice to do, just not clear how nice.

[damienmg]

(note: those costs are rough estimation of the engineering time, we probably needs to speak to legal about what we can do exactly, though this might be covered by the recent fix on GPL with classpath exception code).

[damienmg]

/cc @philwo fyi

[damienmg]

Reassigning priority so we can get rid of the JDK 7 build. Seems like the perfect solution for it. Philip has agreed to investigate further.

[philwo]

The feature is complete, integrated with our build process and in code review & pending final verification on Windows now.

[damienmg]

It would need to integrate with our release pipeline too, but I guess this is just another target to build

[philwo]

Yes, the current approach is that this is just another target that we can build (//src:bazel_with_jdk instead of //src:bazel). :)

[philwo]

All required code changes have been made as of 9504827.

The last step is to actually integrate this into our release pipeline so that we build release artifacts of the new target. I think @damienmg wanted to have a look at this when he has some time.

[damienmg]

I don't think I will have time for it soon enough, but just adding the target in //scripts/package to build the deb and .sh with jdk and then reference them in scripts/ci/build.sh for them to be pushed should be enough.

[abergmeier-dsfishlabs]

Just as an input - we have a JDK for every platform in our repo just because the dependency on Java. Would also greatly appreciate, if that would be solved automagically.

[damienmg]

As per @philwo report this is now working, we still need to figure out #2943 but this one is good to close. Thanks @philwo for making that possible!