Hi Jeff, Sorry to join in on the discussions a little late, I've been away for the past 2 weeks on holidays with my folks. I'm still catching up on all of the traffic from the past couple of weeks - looks like everyone's been busy! great to see everyone's opinions! :-)
On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Jeff Turner wrote: > Really, there are so many complicated issues when you start trying to be > clever with classpaths. I don't know half of them. > > I'm concerned that if Debian's java policy tries to do anything out of > the ordinary, it will cause *someone* out there grief. It will then be > very hard to rectify the situation. Look at the current situation with > /usr/share/java/repository. So IMHO, the only safe thing to do is keep a > clean classpath, put jars in /usr/share/java, and let startup scripts > choose them. If you miss the ease-of-use of a system classpath, set it > in your .bash_profile, or use something like > http://newgate.socialchange.net.au/~jeff/jpe/ I agree with a clean classpath idea here for application level jar's. It's the simplest solution and IMHO it allows much more control, as applications essentially have to become 'self-contained/managed'. Auto-generating a classpath just seems to make things overly-complex, and potentially dangerous in some arenas. Java developer perspective: As a developer I don't want any unnecessary jar's being picked up by java (I rarely use a classpath), this is perhaps just being picky, but I like to know exactly what is being used in my projects and have them 'self-contained', especially when building something to be distributed. Application user & Debian packager perspective: For the end-user, and Debian packager, making startup scripts select which jars are needed means that the intended jars will always be used, and that there should be no side affects from installing other java packages. Some applications, such as cocoon2 for example are quite picky about their 3rd party libraries, and would definitely exhibit undefined and difficult to track down behaviour if older versions of these libraries were used, as you already noticed with Tomcat. Cheers, M. -- ..... ,,$$$$$$$$$, Marcus Crafter ;$' '$$$$: Computer Systems Engineer $: $$$$: Open Software Associates GmbH $ o_)$$$: 82-84 Mainzer Landstrasse ;$, _/\ &&:' 60327 Frankfurt Germany ' /( &&& \_&&&&' Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] &&&&. Business Hours : +49 69 9757 200 &&&&&&&: -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]