Re:OpenJDK now available for Windows
by EvanAnderson on Thursday December 22, 2016 @07:17PM
(#13241714)
As a long-time Windows sysadmin: MSI is vastly superior to ZIP on Windows. You can do the things you're talking about w/ an MSI-based installation so long as the MSI was authoried to include "Properties" (variable substitution) for paths, etc. It's a little bit of additional scripting.
Re:OpenJDK now available for Windows
by user5994461 on Thursday December 22, 2016 @06:18PM
(#13241325)
MSI are more usable for large deployments.
They integrate with windows GPO and it can be rolled out everywhere, among other things.
Re:OpenJDK now available for Windows
by wildmusings on Thursday December 22, 2016 @12:17PM
(#13238685)
I do the same thing on Windows. I try to "install" as little software as possible, and just keep a directory that has all of my software and a few scripts to create start menu shortcuts, file associations, etc.
You should be able to extract an msi with the right msiexec command line switches.
I thought of that. I can often extract MSIs using 7zip. I was about to download until I read that it can only be used for development purposes. Apparently I have to agree not to redistribute it. No thanks Red Hat.
Elsewhere in this thread I discovered:
https://github.com/ojdkbuild/ojdkbuild
And I already knew about:
http://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu/
The more OpenJDK folders I have to test against (on both Linux and Windows), the better. Just change environment variables.
I would also like a simple ZIP file please with no installer. I like to set up some software with an environment variable that points to which JRE / JDK that I want it to use.
Example Use Case:
One Windows OS. Several smallish Tomcat servers. Each Tomcat server has environment variables that point to the CATALINA_HOME (a base unpacked tomcat folder), and a JAVA_HOME which points to a JDK or JRE.
I can stop a tomcat service. Remove it from Services control panel. Change some environment variable pointers in a .BAT file. Re-add it to Services control panel. Then restart the service. Now that server might point to a different Java and/or different Tomcat release.
Similarly Eclipse. I don't "install" it. Just unpack it and create a shortcut to it's launcher. Set its configuration file to point to which of my various Java versions I want it to use -- including multiple vendor's implementations.
Red Hat: I don't WANT to "install" a JDK on Windows.