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

[David Welker]

Hi Tristan,

I agree with you that this InitClassPath idea was probably not a good 
one. I know you have your own Maven build going on... but I should point 
out that in the loader module used with the new build system, 
InitClassPath is no longer used. If you are so inclined, you might want 
to check out the new build system, especially the 1.1 branch. It is, in 
my opinion, a vast improvement over the previous build system. (Note: I 
am, of course, biased, since I have been the person who has primarily 
developed the new build system.) But, perhaps more importantly from your 
perspective, InitClassPath is not used, so this problem you are having 
will no longer exist. As you suggest, in the new build system, I use ant 
to manage the class path, and it does the job.

David
> 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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