I struggled with the following for much of the day trying to build Derby. In section 3.2 Create property file, it states:
3.2 Create property file
You will need to create a property file to specify
your environment and some of your options. Do the following
to specify your environment and options:(1) Find out user home directory on your system. You can find
user home directory by doing echo on variable %HOME%
on windows and $home or $HOME on unix.
However, in my WinXP system, there was no %HOME% variable set. I ended up setting the %HOME% environment variable and put my properties file there. The build susbequently failed because it couldn't find java.lang. After several hours of trying permutations of settings in the properties file, CLASSPATH, JAVA_HOME, and PATH, I ended up figuring out that it wasn't finding the properties file. Once I put the properties file in the
C:\Documents and Settings\My Name
directory, it worked immediately. Possibly a line should be added to 3.2 (1) saying "For Windows XP, the variable is %HOMEPATH% instead of %HOME%."
