Re: packaging jars vs. classes

[Aaron Brashears <gila@gila.org>]

On Wed, Nov 08, 2000 at 12:22:39PM -0800, per@bothner.com wrote:
> Aaron Brashears <gila@gila.org> writes:
> 
> > Joe Emenaker sent a nice idea to me which the list didn't get to
> > see. He suggested making a script which does autodetection of jar
> > files in your /usr/share/java and sets the classpath
> > appropriately.
> 
> Which is what you have to do anyway if you want to implement Java 2.
> 
> http://www.javasoft.com/products/jdk/1.2/docs/guide/extensions/index.html
> 
> There is some question whether is would be better to install class files
> in a standard directory or install jar files in the extensions
> directory.  The former only searches one place; the latter has get the
> indexes of all the jar files.  My guess is that class files is faster
> in the case of many extensions;  searching jar files might be faster
> in the case of just a few extensions.  On the other hand, using jar
> is easier to manage when there are many extensions, and uses less disk
> space.  Also, it is "standard".

I think that only has to do with standard extensions to java, such as
java3d or java media framework. I've been using blackdown's 1.3 jdk
from debs recently, and the script appear to do autodetection of jars,
but does set the classpath to:

CLASSPATH="/usr/share/java/repository:${CLASSPATH:=.}"

The comments around that statement indicate the author is trying to
conform to the debian java policy, but thinks that the repository
should be added to java.ext.dirs. If the java policy collapsed the
/usr/share/java/repository into /usr/share/java and /usr/share/java
was added to java.ext.dirs, java should autodetect everything.