On Sep 19, 2006, at 12:24 PM, Tim Ellison wrote:

Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
On Sep 19, 2006, at 11:02 AM, Tim Ellison wrote:
Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
<snip>
I'm going to modify the launcher to pass "-help" into the VM when it's been named "java*" so that it behaves like the tools that come with the
Sun's, BEA's and IBM's impelmentation.

As I mentioned before, you if you pass "-help" or "-showversion" in the
creation of the IBM or Sun VM you will get an error, e.g.:

  C:\temp\sample>test
  JVMJ9VM007E Command-line option unrecognised: -help
  Failed to create VM with rc=-6.

These command-line flags are handled by the launcher (not the VM).

I need to test that for Sun via a launcher, as just doing "java - help"
w/ the sun JRE works as expected - it prints help.

Sun's VM (1.5.0_06) does the same thing:
  C:\temp\sample>test
  Unrecognized option: -help
  Failed to create VM with rc=-1.

BTW I'm using the test program I posted here, but passing in "-help":
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/ 200609.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Why would one even want to launch Sun this way? I mean, I figure the lack of support of our classlibrary would be a bigger obstacle to use than simply not supporting "-help"


Since in Harmony there is not a 1:1 correlation of launcher to VM
implementation you will have to either print out generic help in the
launcher (bad) or go for an extension to the VM interface to get/ print
help text.

How about passing -help to the VM? I don't grok the downside to this. DRLVM works this way now. that way any localization issues are up to
the VM provider.

I'm just pointing out that not all VMs will grok that option, so the
launcher should not assume they will.


Agreed. But our launcher is for Harmony, and there are already a bunch of pre-reqs...

We can add a requirement to the VMI that VMs can answer/print their help
text, but right now we have no such thing.  Existing VMs will fail to
initialize (unless you set ignoreUnrecognized, in which case you won't
get help text of course).

I'm still confused. When you say "existing VMs". you mean J9? Because besides DRLVM, there are no others that work w/ the launcher...


Having the launcher print out help based on the executable name would be
bad - it has to be some thing else.

I don't see that we could do that anyway, since the launcher is always
java.exe, and different VMs will have different help text.

Right.

What I mean is some scheme where we base help text on exe name, like "javac" "java" "javah" etc...

So to try to drive this to conclusion, I don't get it - what would be wrong with adding "supports all options passed through the launcher except vmdir: and vm:" to our list of things that a harmony- supporting VM does?

geir


Regards,
Tim

I believe that you could write a useful generic implementation of
version info since VMs put that into system properties.

True - we could solve the version problem that way...

geir


Regards,
Tim

IOW, I think that users expect :

./java

..... print help here....


But we do need to hunt down why it exits so ungracefully - this is a
good test case showing problems since it's so simple.

geir


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Tim Ellison ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
IBM Java technology centre, UK.

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IBM Java technology centre, UK.

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