On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 23:54:02 -0800, Jeremy Boynes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ah, I thought it was because there were problems if the directory was > empty (e.g. CVS would remove it). Resurrecting it now. > > Don't know if its needed by jikes but it seems to be used by the > class_size_catalog target.
The problem, specifically, is that Ant will add its Java runtime classes to the classpath if Jikes is used as the compiler and any <javac> task's bootclasspath attribute is null, empty, or contains only unresolvable classpath elements. By adding a real, but empty, jar file to the classpath, we prevent Ant from adding its runtime classes to the classpath, giving us complete control over the compilation classpath. This might be considered a bug in Ant's Jikes CompilerAdapter, but I believe the issue was raised a long time ago and it was decided to keep the behavior the way it is, since it can be overridden this way. If there is concern, I'll be glad to take it up again with the Ant folks. :-) (as an aside, I attempted to exploit this behavior while trying to hook the Derby build into the nightly gump build, to get the JDK 1.3 runtime classes into the classpath when needed, but other factors got in the way.) andrew
