[Improvement]: Prevent Ballerina from installing 3rd Party JDK dependencies

[conradwt]

Description

When one installs or updates Ballerina, they may be inadvertently installing 3rd party JDK dependencies out of their control.

Describe your problem(s)

➜ ls -al
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  4 root  wheel  128 Sep 24 15:48 .
drwxr-xr-x  7 root  wheel  224 Oct  7 10:56 ..
drwxr-xr-x  8 root  wheel  256 Aug 19 06:37 jdk-11.0.18+10-jre
drwxr-xr-x  9 root  wheel  288 Sep 24 15:48 jdk-17.0.7+7-jre

Now, it's not clear to me as to which JDK is being used by Ballerina. I'm guessing it's the more recent version of JDK. In short, this will accumulate over time and I'm looking for a better way to manage JDKs for my entire system instead of a single application.

Describe your solution(s)

I have a couple of solutions:

1). Add Ballerina to both MacPorts and Homebrew package repositories.

2). Simply allow users to install their own 3rd party JDKs

3). Allow all of the above.

Related area

-> Update Tool

Related issue(s) (optional)

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Suggested label(s) (optional)

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[udda1996]

@conradwt Thank you for your suggestions.

1. Yes it is true that the JDKs can get accumulated over time when you use Ballerina distributions that depend on different JDKs. We will add a feature to delete the respective JDK once all the distributions depending on that particular JDK got deleted (Since multiple distributions could depend on a single JDK). Add dependency delete feature once all the distributions under a given dependency got deleted #333
2. We have already included Ballerina in Homebrew https://ballerina.io/downloads/installation-options/#install-via-homebrew
3. We will work on adding Ballerina at MacPorts

[conradwt]

@udda1996 I look forward to Ballerina on MacPorts. Then one can simply use one of the existing JDK ports like openjdk21-zul on MacPorts with Ballerina.