Just wanted to share experiences with the initialization sequence and trying to resolve the character encoding problem.
To fill in various system properties in Runtime we use native code to get C char arrays with output from things like uname, cwd etc. These are returned as Java byte arrays and have to be converted to Java Strings. The correct way to do this seemed to be to use the String(byte[]) constructor and ensure the corrected decoder was used. But this wasn't possible because the EncodingManager.<clinit> uses System.getProperty and that would be called before System.<clinit> had actually initialized its properties object. Hence we'd get a NullPointerException. To fix this Runtime now forces System to use it's properties object until System.<clinit> reaches the point were it clones runtime's properties object. Before I set any system properties I now extract the default character set name, acquired via native code, and use that to set the file.encoding property. Then I set all the encoding alias properties in case the default charset name is actually an alias. After that I can construct Strings from byte[] using the right decoding. I'm curious how others have dealt with this issue. I'm no expert on character-set/locale/internationalization issues. Related to this problem, I also found out that any exception that occurs prior to the point where System clones the runtime properties will cause recursive exceptions because Throwable.<clinit> also uses System.getProperty, which will throw NPE. I'd be tempted to have any static initialization code that needs a system property to read it direct from Runtime.properties - though of course that only works for classes in java.lang. Cheers, David Holmes _______________________________________________ Classpath mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/classpath
