On Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:28:53 +0200, Jaco Greeff wrote:
>> Actually, in JDK 1.1, CLASSPATH does not need to be set to
>> get the core Java classes.zip file. The Java wrapper does that.
>
>Ok. That makes sense. I actually found this out without even trying and was
>quite surprised!
>
>> The other thing that would be good is a standard place to put
>> jar/zip files (or links to them) such that you do not need to
>> keep adding them to the classpath in *user* space.
>
>That would be great! This is actually what I meant in my original
>question... It is starting to get quite a mission adding a jar/zip/path to
>your path just to try things out. If the java wrapper could read (with
>links) all the jar/zip/class files in "jdk/lib/usr" or some path like that
>it would be great and save a lot of trouble. The problem with the approach
>obviously is that ALL the classes will get loded into memory... mmmm, not
>good. (The wrapper obviously knows to read the classes.zip file from
>"jdk/lib", so why not the user classes?)
It is not that simple - especially if some of the jar/zip files have
replacement classes (such as some debuggers have) for the classes.zip
file.
WHat is the order of the files?
Anyway, I think it is easily doable for UNIX systems using symbolic
links into a directory and having them encode in the ordering (like
the rcX.d directories do) but this is not a solution that can be done
for "Java" since not all Java systems run on Unix. (One rather important
system, Windows, does not even support softlinks in the OS at all -
don't count the GUI "links" - and WindowsNT supports hardlinks but by
default the user has no way of making those since you need the NT resource
kit to get the "ln" command.)
Anyway, Sun has been working on this for JDK 1.2 - I just hope that
the solution does not have yet another case of "almost" there.
(The 1.1 JDK almost had it except that the -classpath option does not
append the required classes.zip file and thus if you use that you need
to find classes.zip and put that into the -classpath option and...
It is just a mess.)
Michael Sinz -- Director of Research & Development, NextBus Inc.
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] --------- http://www.nextbus.com
My place on the web ---> http://www.users.fast.net/~michael_sinz
