In the context of self-contained application I'm facing the requirement to call the application's JVM with a policy file.
Basically I'd like to be able to write something like:

[Mac] Info.plist

  <key>JVMOptions</key>
  <array>
<string>-Djava.policy.file=$APPDIR/app/whatever.policy</string>
    <string>-Djava.security.manager</string>
  </array>

[Windows, Linux] package.cfg

  jvmarg.1=-Djava.policy.file=$APPDIR/app/whatever.policy
  jvmarg.2=-Djava.security.manager

and automagically the code of the launcher would substitute $APPDIR (or any other better syntax) by the application's absolute installation path when constructing the command line used to start the JVM.
The two security options listed above must be set before the JVM starts up, and we've no statically known installation path: the launcher seems to be the place to look at, isn't it ?