Configuration for OpenRefine on Windows should use only 1 config file (.ini)

[thadguidry]

Is your feature request related to a problem or area of OpenRefine? Please describe.
On Windows, OpenRefine has 2 .ini files that can be used for applying JVM settings. We should only have 1 .ini file.

Describe the solution you'd like
Allow the openrefine.exe launching to read settings from the refine.ini file only.
Remove the openrefine.l4j.ini file from packaging.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context
Fixing this issue would be a better way to handle than just adding more documentation PR #3042 on this already confusing issue.

[wetneb]

By the way the OpenRefine project has funding available to work on this. Do you know someone who would be able to get this fixed? Send them our way!
https://openrefine.org/blog/2022/09/30/windows-macos-packaging.html

[wetneb]

I had a quick look to estimate the difficulty of this task and put a reasonable price tag on it.

The openrefine.l4j.ini and refine.ini do not use the same syntaxes, so one cannot directly point either refine.bat to openrefine.l4j.ini or openrefine.exe to refine.ini.

The name openrefine.l4j.ini is hardcoded by Launch4j into openrefine.exe so this filename does not seem configurable, see:
https://launch4j.sourceforge.net/docs.html#Additional_jvm_options

Therefore the simplest solution for this would probably be to adapt refine.bat so that it uses openrefine.l4j.ini, changing it so that it accepts the syntax currently used there. This would be slightly odd in the sense that refine.bat would rely on a file with l4j in its name while Lanch4j is not used at all by refine.bat, but I would say this would still be an improvement over the current situation and still solve this issue.

It should not be too hard to submit a patch to Launch4j to make this filename configurable, but it will probably take a while before this is merged and released, so that could be a follow-up issue on this.

[wetneb]

Just for fun I tried to make Launch4j configurable: https://sourceforge.net/p/launch4j/git/merge-requests/20/.
But I still think the easiest solution would be to adapt refine.bat.

[wetneb]

Good news, my PR in Launch4j was merged so this filename should be configurable in the next Launch4j release. After that it should be possible for Windows and Linux to use the same configuration file. I am not sure about Mac OS though - for now the options seem to be loaded from some info.plist according to the docs, and it looks not so easy to change that.

[wetneb]

Update: this is still blocked by necessary changes in Launch4j. The following PR needs merging and releasing: https://sourceforge.net/p/launch4j/git/merge-requests/21/