[kepler-dev] what's the deal with org.kepler.loader.InitClassPath?

[Chad Berkley]

Hi Tristan,

I think this class is there so that the classpath can be amended to 
allow for different versions of the same class in different jars.  I 
think Dan Crawl last worked on it, so I'll let him explain more.  I 
think it's a bug that it finds files in the .svn directories.  They 
should probably be explicitly excluded from the search as we will never 
want anything in those directories in the classpath.

We have plans to overhaul this system sometime in the next year when we 
start re-architecting the core of kepler.

As for including all of jython in kepler, I don't have a problem with 
that as long as it isn't 20 MB of jar files or something huge like that. 
  We're in the process of breaking kepler up into modules which will be 
built by a single build system.  A Jython module would probably be a 
nice addition to kepler.  I'm hoping to have the new directory structure 
for the modules sorted out in the next week or so and I'm almost at a 
point where I can check in the changes that I've made to split the core 
of kepler away from other functionality.  Needless to say, there are 
some pretty large changes coming to Kepler in the next couple weeks. 
You might want to wait just a bit until we get this new system in place 
before adding Jython.  We'll make an announcement to the community when 
everything is ready to go.

thanks,
chad


Tristan King wrote:
> I've been messing around with kepler's jython support recently trying to 
> get kepler to use my system's jython install rather than the jython.jar 
> included with kepler and run into an interesting problem.
> 
> The InitClassPath class recursively goes through the lib/jar/ directory 
> and adds anything it finds to the classpath. This includes the 
> .svn/**/*.jar.svn-base files. Thus, even if i overwrite the 
> lib/jar/jython.jar file, the lib/jar/.svn/prop-base/jython.jar.svn-base 
> file is found and added to the classpath, and since . comes before j, 
> the .svn/ version of jython.jar takes precedence in the classpath. I 
> haven't tested this, but assume that this would effect any other files 
> in the lib/jar/ directory. If you try and update a library, you wont be 
> able to test it until you check the file into svn, which overwrites the 
> stored .svn version of the file.
> 
> Is there any advantage to the InitClassPath class other than removing 
> the need to write out the classpath manually in release builds? Because 
> I can't see one, and I don't think the aforementioned reason is a good 
> reason for trying to build something that ant provides already, and does 
> right!
> 
> -- 
> Tristan King
> Research Officer,
> eResearch Centre
> James Cook University, Townsville Qld 4811
> Australia
> 
> Phone: +61747816902
> E-mail: tristan.king at jcu.edu.au <mailto:tristan.king at jcu.edu.au> www: 
> http://eresearch.jcu.edu.au
> 
> 
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