Re: Symlinking jars is dangerous (Re: The evils of /usr/share/java/repository)
Hi Jeff,
Sorry to join in on the discussions a little late, I've been away for
the past 2 weeks on holidays with my folks. I'm still catching up on
all of the traffic from the past couple of weeks - looks like
everyone's been busy! great to see everyone's opinions! :-)
On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Jeff Turner wrote:
> Really, there are so many complicated issues when you start trying to be
> clever with classpaths. I don't know half of them.
>
> I'm concerned that if Debian's java policy tries to do anything out of
> the ordinary, it will cause *someone* out there grief. It will then be
> very hard to rectify the situation. Look at the current situation with
> /usr/share/java/repository. So IMHO, the only safe thing to do is keep a
> clean classpath, put jars in /usr/share/java, and let startup scripts
> choose them. If you miss the ease-of-use of a system classpath, set it
> in your .bash_profile, or use something like
> http://newgate.socialchange.net.au/~jeff/jpe/
I agree with a clean classpath idea here for application level jar's.
It's the simplest solution and IMHO it allows much more control, as
applications essentially have to become 'self-contained/managed'.
Auto-generating a classpath just seems to make things overly-complex,
and potentially dangerous in some arenas.
Java developer perspective: As a developer I don't want any
unnecessary jar's being picked up by java (I rarely use a classpath),
this is perhaps just being picky, but I like to know exactly what is
being used in my projects and have them 'self-contained', especially
when building something to be distributed.
Application user & Debian packager perspective: For the end-user, and
Debian packager, making startup scripts select which jars are needed
means that the intended jars will always be used, and that there should
be no side affects from installing other java packages.
Some applications, such as cocoon2 for example are quite picky about
their 3rd party libraries, and would definitely exhibit undefined and
difficult to track down behaviour if older versions of these libraries
were used, as you already noticed with Tomcat.
Cheers,
M.
--
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