Option to use Java libraries instead of native tools when possible

[stevedlawrence]

Currently, generating native packages often uses binaries on the system, for example universal:packageZipTarball executes the tar command to generate the tarball. However, this can fail if the user doesn't have tar installed on their system, which is common in the case of Windows users. Likewise with tools like rpmbuild for generating rpms. It would be nice to use libraries when possible to reduce the amount of dependencies on having proper tools installs. In some cases, this is impossible, but for cases like tar, there are many Java libraries that can handle the task.

[muuki88]

You are absolutely right. We have started with JDeb for debian packaging. Feel free to make suggestions for libraries or provide a pull request :)

[jsuereth]

one quick note:

Specifically for zip/tar we still prefer the native libraries because experiments with using Java lib alternatives lead to some "custom" flags (like executable bit mask, which is not part of the "ZIP spec" but used by Info-Zip) were not getting written, leading to differences in behavior from native versions.

I agree with you that we should use java alternatives. Ideally, I'd like to see us discover what is available on a system and fall back to java if we cannot use the underlying tool (at least this is what I think after running into all sorts of odd issues with bits not getting set).