>> I want to make it easy for my projects to be downloaded and 
>> built without any
>> major CLASSPATH hacks.  I am putting all my .jar files into 
>> PROJECT/lib but I am
>> hving to manually add EACH .jar into the "classpath" 
>> attribute on the javac
>> task.
> 
> That's what extension directories are for - use the extdirs parameter
> to javac.
> 
> Jon

Without jar versioning, extdirs are a fairly broken idea.  If you can get away 
with always have the same versions of the same jars in your VM, it's a great 
idea.  I found that the concept might work in a deployment environment - *if* 
you deploy a separate VM for each application - but for a developer, it just 
isn't practical.

I would love to see Sun take this idea a bit further and actually add 
versioning to jars.  If you could put something like this in your application 
manifests:

  <requires jar="xerces.jar" version="1.4.0"/>

the extdirs system might be much friendlier.

roger


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