"Ean R . Schuessler" wrote: > The best advice is perhaps to follow what policy actually states as > the technique for dealing with programs that require an environment > setting, a wrapper script. It is fairly trivial (1 line of shell code) > to read in a list of configured classpaths from a folder in /etc and > use these to build a classpath for the VM being spawned.
This solution is certainly not perfect but I would prefer it over /usr/share/java/repository. One problem that this solution has is that the classpath might get really long (when there are many installed packages) and so the time the classloader takes to load a new class will be very long. It takes a lot longer to look into several jar or zip archives than to search in a directory (like the shell's command path does). I think the core classes to each JVM should be handled in separate files like /etc/jdk1.1/classpath, /etc/kaffe/classpath and then using alternatives for /etc/classpath.d/00core (or 99core?) for e.g. jikes. > The shell script would do the proper expansion when calling the VM. > This would allow you to customize the classpath and still get the > benefits of dynamic jar inclusion. Right. Most JVMs already need a wrapper script (e.g. to find a shared library which provied native/green threads or a JIT) so we won't lose a lot here. > I am considering putting it into the kaffe package in some form whether > it is adopted on a wider basis or not. Please do so. We than can then test this scheme and maybe find a better one if it's not good enough. Just discussing without an existing implementaion doesn't buy us much. > I frankly don't intend to follow the current Java policy as it stands > because I simply don't think that it is the right way to solve the > problem. While we are at it: I already expressed my dislike for the naming scheme in the policy (lib-X-java) which is taken from C libraries. I propose to use the scheme from Phyton instead (java-X). What do other people think about this? Now that the freeze has been rescheduled we have enough time to discuss all these topics before the potato release. -- Stefan Gybas
