Manifests are dangerous (Re: Symlinking jars is dangerous)

["Joe Emenaker" <joe@emenaker.com>]

> 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