Re: [PROPOSAL] New Virtual Packages and way to handle Classpath
Hallo Jan,
--- Jan Schulz <jasc.usenet@gmx.de> wrote:
> Hallo Dalibor,
>
> * Dalibor Topic wrote:
> >but the other, much greater part of the problem is application writers who
> >assume that the whole world uses sun's jdk. Thus they muck around with
> >$JAVA_HOME, try to load sun.* classes, try to put a non-existant
> >$JAVA_HOME/jre/tools.jar in their CLASSPATH, and so on.
>
> eclipse has a really nice policy about such things... for the 3.0
> release, the break a lot of things, but it all well documented. And
> they have a really fine tuned API system, down to which methods are
> API and which not.
Sun also has a (depending on your needs, not so) nice API documentation.
Problem is that a lot of people don't really care about it, but use internal
details of Sun's implementation like JAVA_HOME that aren't part of the Java
APIs.
> >So for example you'll se a lot of broken build.xml files, that assume the
> java
> >compiler is greedy, and automatically tracks down files needs to compile a
> >class if they don't appear on the command line. Well, surprise, kaffe's java
> >compiler, kjc, does not, and there is no spec saying a compiler needs to do
> it.
>
> IMO, in this cases its better to go with 'everybody'... This should be
> a one line change...
I don't think so. You have to somewhat intelligently search through source
directories to see if you can find the missing files somewhere. If you find an
old version somewhere you're going to have some trouble ;) If you find multiple
instances of the missing source file as well, and so on.
All of that takes more than one line in my book ;)
But my point is that the problem is not kjc, but people sheepishly relying on
undocumented behaviour. There is no need to fix kjc in this respect, one needs
to educate the other developers not to rely on specifics on Sun's platform if
they want to be portable / be a part of free software offerings in debian.
> >there are no free software java browser plugins (yet). [...]
>
> Then at least the unfree should be made working with our packaging.
I can't tell people what to do with their time, though I'd prefer to see people
helping to make free as in speech java implementations rock, instead of making
it easy to trade freedom for comfort.
cheers,
dalibor topic
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Reply to: