Corretto-8 Preview JDK RPM, Appears to be just a JRE about corretto-8

[bric3]

@lordbuddha they inverted the JRE and JDK links 🤦‍♂️ https://twitter.com/BriceDutheil/status/1065624528204824576

[bernd-aws]

Thank you for spotting and reporting it! This needs to be fixed.

[lordbuddha]

Yes, as pointed out the links are just the wrong way around. But that is not all.

If we look at the relative sizes of each of the 4 downloads, we see that the "devel" (i.e. the JDK) RPM is smaller that the JRE.... Neat magic trick if achieved.

:~/Downloads$ ls -lh *.rpm *.pkg *.msi
92M Nov 27 13:09 Amazon-Corretto-preview-8u192.msi
383K Jul 12 14:46 ca-certificates-2018.2.24-5.fc29.noarch.rpm
103M Nov 27 13:09 corretto-jdk-8u192-macosx-x64.pkg
39M Nov 27 13:08 java-1.8.0-amazon-corretto-1.8.0_192.b12-1.amzn2.x86_64.rpm
35M Nov 27 13:08 java-1.8.0-amazon-corretto-devel-1.8.0_192.b12-1.amzn2.x86_64.rpm

Apparently (and I did see this somewhere else), to get the JDK you need to install both RPMs.

This seems a quite strange way of doing things.

[bric3]

@lordbuddha That's what I thought at first, but the two download are actually a way of packaging, the JRE can be a standalone install, but the JDK depends on the JRE.

> rpm -qpR java-1.8.0-amazon-corretto-devel-1.8.0_192.b12-1.amzn2.x86_64.rpm
...
java-1.8.0-amazon-corretto(x86-64) = 1:1.8.0_192.b12-1.amzn2
...

This works if one is using a package manager like yum. But if you download the files you basically have to check the dependencies yourself.

However I agree the site is misleading in that regard.

[davecurrie]

@lordbuddha, @bric3 - Thanks for your input. We have chosen to package Corretto for Amazon Linux 2 following its packaging conventions and, as you state, the -devel package depends on the base amazon-corretto to make a full JDK when installed together. We will make a note to clarify this in the next revision of the documentation.

[bric3]

@davecurrie Your decision makes sense for RPM (or deb when they will be available) because the documented way to install them rely on yum and the extras repo already configured for Amazon Linux. But as binary download it comes as a surprise, because there's no documentation.

At least with Java 11 we won't need the JRE ;)

[lordbuddha]

I for one will miss the JRE only distribution in Java 11 and onwards.

We run all our production systems on a JRE.

[davecurrie]

The downloads page at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-8-ug/downloads-list.html has been updated with the Linux packages pointing to the right artifacts. Keeping this issue open for a few more days until we expand the install documentation to explain the roles of the two RPM packages.

[davecurrie]

The documentation at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-8-ug/amazon-linux-install.html has also beel updated to reflect that the JRE package needs to be installed for the JDK package to work correctly.