> My turn to say "tread carefully". > > Symlinking jars can be dangerous, because jars can contain a Class-path: > line in their manifests. These Class-path: lines contain relative > references to other jars.
I'm not really an advocate of the symlinking idea, but am I the only one that thinks that this manifesat classpath thing is psychotic? Jars referencing other jars? Even in other directories? So I'm not free to rename or move a jar that refers (or is referred to) unless I move all of the "family" in parallel? Is there anything to prevent circular references? It *looks* like this was someone's attempt at reducing the amount of stuff people had to specify on the command-line or in ENV vars... but this is just the wrong way to do it, IMHO. What if someone releases two jars and foo.jar's manifest makes reference to "../../../../../../../../bar.jar"? Am I faced with either putting bar.jar in my root dir or not using the package at all? - Joe
