findjava is the question, is fixjava the answer?
I wrote (and lost) a Perl program called fixjava, which finds all the
JVMs (and compilers) on the system, plus the default one, and allows the user to
configure the one they want (and test against various Java versions).
I did the configuration by telling the user what PATH to set, but maybe
this would be better done using the alternatives system (I wasn't
thinking Debian-only at the time).
Do you think this is worth writing again?
Also, the findjava stuff, as far as I can tell, does not require that
whenever kaffe changes its command line options it needs to send a patch
to findjava. Instead, kaffe can implement its own 'java' wrapper that
is command-line compatible with the Sun one (except -X options,
obviously). findjava seems to fix problems with other JVMs that don't
provide this, and I can't see any conflict here.
Is there a JVM in existence that doesn't provide the standard 'java'
wrapper (except Sun etc., where it isn't a wrapper, obviously)?
Regards,
Ricky.
On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 11:22:49PM -0500, Ean Schuessler wrote:
> I still don't understand what this achieves that alternatives do not.
> There is nothing particularly special about Java that requires a more
> elaborate alternatives mechanism than any other interpreter. If the
> wrapper script for each VM does its job properly then the classpath
> should get set to what it needs to be and the VM will be invoked with
> all the proper conventions.
>
> It would seem to me that findjava will simply invoke whichever VM it
> finds first in its list of VMs and that will be that. It loses the
> priority mechanism of the alternatives scheme and doesn't really add
> that much that cannot be done with proper wrapper scripts for each VM.
>
> I may need to go back and read the earlier discussions more carefully
> but I never saw how the findjava script adds anything that cannot be
> achieved using the usual (and up til now sufficient) mechanisms that
> Debian already provides.
>
> Sorry for the continued stubborn-headedness.
>
> On Tue, 2003-10-07 at 18:48, Jan Schulz wrote:
> > The goal is to provide a search mechnism for the alternatives. The
> > discussion in debian-java has shown, that the alternative machnism
> > isn't enough and especial isn't reliable.
> >
> > findjava will be called with the list of the 'known working' java
> > implementations and will either return one of them, which is
> > installed or exit with an error code. This will ensure that the
> > called java command is known to be working with your package. The
> > basic equivalent of this code is
> >
> > for java in /usr/bin/kaffe /usr/lib/j2sdk1.4/bin/java ... ; do
> > if [ -x $java ] ; then
> > JAVACMD="$java"
> > break
> > fi
> > done
>
> --
> _____________________________________________________________________
> Ean Schuessler ean@brainfood.com
> Chief Technology Officer 214-720-0700 x 315
> Brainfood, Inc. http://www.brainfood.com
>
>
>
>
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