I believe the only requirements are javac, javah, javadoc (optional)
and a JVM to run the tests on. Is it possible to keep this going,
or would that require a lot of work?
+1 on this. Having just the minimum, core
packages
available in the repo would be good, especially since:
a) It would mean users can still run third-party Java apps.
b) I believe that, similar to Python, many end-users use maven
(or whatever else) for installing dependencies, instead of the distro's repo,
so the removal of other packages didn't affect them as much.
I notice that javah no longer seems to exist.
javah is now
part of javac, invoked using the -h option.
If my research is right, the last edition with a separate javah was Java SE 9.
A.FI.