Location of Java libraries [Was: tomcat41 producing 28 javadaemons]

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

Hello Herve,

Monday, April 5, 2004, 2:56:19 PM, you wrote:

> The main problem IMHO, is that it's not "right" to install several times
> the same JAR. For instance, Xerces-J JARs would be (and are currently)
> installed with any port that needs Xerces-J, even if textproc/xerces-j
> is already installed. This does not fit well with the philosophy behind
> the port dependency scheme provided by the FreeBSD ports system.

> But I agree with you about the complexity of dealing with conflicting
> set of JAR files, or version number problems... I had suggested to use a
> symbolic link mechanism (just like for non-java libraries) a long time
> ago but I realized it was a bit too complex.

Well taking into account that most projects supply their entire
library set with them (or at least have packages that include them all
at once), I'd say this IS the way to go for Java apps. Dependencies
are just too hard to figure out and realistically, who cares for 100
MB HD more or less these days (especially as Java will easily eat more
RAM than that anyhow)? Sure, downloads take a bit longer but I've long
since come to the conclusion that a lot of trouble on Unix systems
would be completely avoided if everything was statically linked (at
the cost that you'd need to update everything if libc had a bug...)
and with Java's usual class path nightmare, I'm even more inclined to
say give each app its own set of libs, so not to break anything during
upgrades...

Best regards,
 Gabriel