I've been thinking about the way debian java packages are built. For example, libxerces-java and ant are both distributed as jar files which wind up in /usr/share/java and some documentation which goes in /usr/share/doc/<package-name>. According to the java policy, debian java packages can be distributed as jar files or class files in the /usr/share/java/repository. There's also a proposed change to simply place classes in the correct hierarchy in /usr/share/java.
After some reflection it seems that it would make more sense to just copy the class files in /usr/share/java so setting the classpath for standard packages would be handled once by setting CLASSPATH=/usr/share/java once instead of having to tack on new jar file to the classpath every time a new package is installed. It certainly wouldn't make sense to have to mention each individual executable that gets installed into the path, so why do we do it for java? I'd like to hear other opinions.
