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[Fwd: Manifests are dangerous (Re: Symlinking jars is dangerous)]




This should have gone to the list..

--
? Mike Gratton - mike@vee.net
! Leader in leachate production and transmission since 1976.
> http://web.vee.net/
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Joe Emenaker wrote:

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?



I actually think it's pretty cool. It may be questionable to use on a server, but is massively useful for client-side applications.

Getting someone to run `java -jar MyApp.jar` is *so* much easier than trying to cope with every platform's (UNIX, Windows, MacOS) different way of specifiying a classpath.


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?


Well, you use Debian, so you could use symlinks.


Is there anything to prevent circular references?



Not sure. I doubt it.


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.


I can't think of a *more convenient* way to do it, without resorting to custom classloaders, or platform-specific scrips, or whatever.


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?


Ahh, well they're stupid then. Really, there's no point for someone to reference a jar in that fashion - that is an abuse of the mechanism. And would you really want to use software written by someone with such a blatant lack of clue? 8)

What would you do if a program forced you to create the directory: /Joe/Blogs/Program/Data? Would you a) use it, b) get it fixed, c) fix it yourself or d) use another program that did the same thing?

Mike.

--
? Mike Gratton - mike@vee.net
! Leader in leachate production and transmission since 1976.
> http://web.vee.net/


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