Re: Java Classpath builder

[andrew@pimlott.ne.mediaone.net (Andrew Pimlott)]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 11:23:52PM +0100, Max Kellermann wrote:
> I have made a Debian package containing an experimental java
> classpath builder

Hi Max.  I took a quick look at your package.  I think the idea is
basically right, but I would be somewhat disappointed if we couldn't
fit the necessary metadata right into the .jar files themselves.

For those who didn't look, in Max's system, each .jar file gets a
.jac file in a separate database.  An example .jac file:

    % cat leanedit.jac 
    Name: leanedit
    Version: 1.8.4-0
    Path: /usr/share/java/leanedit.jar
    Depends: trax, jaxp, makelib (>= 1.8.4)

I think that the name and version could be encoded in the filename:
/usr/share/java/leanedit-1.8.4.jar .  And the dependencies (and also
probably the name and version, redundantly) could be put in the .jar
manifest.  If the official manifest fields defined by Sun are not
suitable, we could just define our own.  The path isn't necessary,
because the classpath builder should know the system .jar directory
(though there should be a way to override and supplement it).

In short, I think we could make this work a bit more like C
libraries, with DT_SONAME and DT_NEEDED and LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  If it
is possible to put all the information in one place, I would prefer
this to a separate database.

Andrew