Re: Manifests are dangerous (Re: Symlinking jars is dangerous)
On Tue, Sep 18, 2001 at 06:10:43PM -0700, Joe Emenaker wrote:
>
> > 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?
No you're not ;)
> Jars referencing other jars? Even in other directories?
Yes, and 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?
Indeed :)
> Is there anything to prevent circular references?
Circular dependencies are allowed, and are somehow resolved.
> 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.
Well apparently some people think it's a good idea.
http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a//onjava/2001/06/26/ejb.html
> 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?
Isn't it cool how Sun foists these things on us ;) Doesn't mean anyone
has to use the mechanism (and most people don't), but it does rather
preclude a standardized naming convention for jars.
--Jeff
> - Joe
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