[jboss-as7-dev] Changed arguments…can we do better ? :P

[Max Rydahl Andersen]

> Someone just mentioned that Max posted this question regarding AS7 startup:
> 
>> Going over the AS7.1 server and how startup arguments has changed we
>> noticed besides the -logmodule not being needed the following two was
>> added:
>> 
>> -Djboss.modules.system.pkgs=org.jboss.byteman
>> -Djava.awt.headless=true
>> . . .
>> Any reason why byte man gets added and not the others ?
> 
> Yes. If you don't add this at startup then the module loader will hide 
> all the Byteman classes from all JBoss classloaders. This means that you 
> cannot decide to install a Byteman agent after AS startup in order to 
> debug/trace behaviour in a broken App Server. It just won't work (TM). 
> That's going to give our support team (not to mention our developers who 
> need to use Byteman for testing) a major headache.

Yes, I know - same problem for those wanting to use jprofiler, yourkit, eclemma, and others.

> Of course, we could always advise all AS7 users to configure this 
> setting in their own startup and leave it undefined by default but in 
> practice that's just going to be a FAIL. David Lloyd and I discussed 
> this some months back (July 11?) and having checked that adding this to 
> the startup had *negligible* overhead it was added as a default.

Yes, I just suggest we make this list include more than just byteman and 
take it *off* the commandline into a setting.

> Also, I think the idea of adding this via a properties file sounds nice 
> at first but actually it is just splitting up the config by another 
> name. One file to rule them all . . .

The problem is there are not one file to rule them all.

There is one per OS  and tools that need to launch cannot use the .bat/.sh files
since no way to portably and reliably kill the process.

/max
http://about.me/maxandersen