On 2025-05-30, Earl Hood wrote: > I recently came across the need to use the -cp launcher option instead of > -lib as I needed to control which jars in a directory are loaded. However, > I noticed -cp is undocumented and only realized it existed by examining the > Launcher.java source.
> Question: Will the -cp option continued to be supported even though it is > undocumented? Launcher was introduced ages ago and I don't really recall why -cp was never documented. I can only guess here. In fact I just had to look at the code to recall what it was doing. It is kind of hard to explain the difference between -cp and -lib (no difference at al for files). I believe -cp really only exists as a way to send down CLASSPATH from the wrapper script to the launcher. If you look at the commit that introduced it[1] it was in order to fix a bug[2] against the way the wrapper scripts treated CLASSPATH prior to the patch. So we never really deemed it an official API - maybe. Given the way we've tried to avoid breaking backwards compatibility in the past I very much doubt, anybody will remove any command line option from Launcher. The risk of breaking things for other people who read the code - just like you did - would be too big. Stefan [1] https://github.com/apache/ant/commit/543344b83993d92a562a4db14717a1a8f27f499d [2] https://bz.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=28046 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org
