Come up with a better way to supply Maven Central artifacts

[cilki]

To bundle external dependencies, you currently have to specify them in both the modules parameter and the artifacts parameter. For example:

GET: /runtime/x64/linux/11.0.8+10?modules=org.slf4j&artifacts=org.slf4j:slf4j-api:2.0.0-alpha1

Most people won't be building these by hand, but it's still not very attractive. I'm thinking of creating a YML or JSON format containing this info that we can ingest instead. It would still be possible to upload a module-info.java, but this new descriptor file would also need to be present to describe the versions of external artifacts. The descriptor could also be given by itself.

Here's an example of something that might work:

repositories:
  - https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots
modules:
  - java.desktop
  - org.slf4j: org.slf4j:slf4j-api:2.0.0-alpha1

This file could be committed to version control or automatically generated by a Gradle or Maven plugin. I'm contemplating the uncreative name: jlink.online.yml.

The artifacts parameter would go away as a result of this change.

[cilki]

An improved example:

version: 11.0.8+11
os: linux
architecture: x64
modules:
  - java.base
  - org.slf4j
external:
  repositories:
    - https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots
  artifacts:
    - org.slf4j:slf4j-api:2.0.0-alpha1

If no repositories are provided, the default would be https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2.