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Reply-To: <hoppe@sitewaerts.de>
From: "Daniel Hoppe" <hoppe@sitewaerts.de>
To: <ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
Subject: RE: [BUG?] Java Task adds Ant Classpath when forking
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 20:11:25 +0100
Message-ID: <903A7281CDB7D4118A5000500450BB084F3F@samoa.sitewaerts>
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Conor, Sam,

>> [ copying Daniel as I'm not sure he follows Ant-dev, in any case, I
haven't seem him recently here;
I'm on the list now.

>> Daniel, the change was identional, with the rationalle (and consensus
with
>> only Peter Donald essentially abstaining) that the previous behavior of
>> ignoring the user's classpath was a bug.  Peter's concern was that this
>> change was not backwards compatible, and the fact that this change has
>> affected you to the point that you found it worth reporting as a
potential
>> bug certainly adds validity to this concern.

I suppose this would have been documented in a stable release. If the change
is outlined in bold letters, it should do for most users.

>I too have found this to break my builds. In my case, I can probably get
>around it by setting my classpath appropriately. I'll give you my example,
>albeit somewhat weblogic centric. I run a minimal classpath with just
>weblogic/classes in it to supply the DTD for ejbjar (I actually want this
>requirement to go away). When I run ejbjar, however, I place a weblogic
>service pack jar in front of weblogic/classes. This is pretty important.
>Ant's new behaviour means the weblogic/classes from my classpath ends up in
>front. It also means that ant's parser is being used in place of
weblogic's.
>That is probably not a good thing.

In my case this was nearly the same situation. I am using a newer version of
the parser interfaces than included in weblogic's jars. Having classes in
two classpaths tends to giving strange exceptions at unexpected places (e.g.
ClassNotFoundExceptions). I expected a WebLogic related problem, so it took
me a while to figure out what was going on.

>In the light of this experience, I would like the default changed to
ignore.

As I did not follow the former discussion on this point my opinion is
probably not that sophisticated and from a user's point of view, please
excuse if my argumentation seems defective or has been discussed before. For
me setting classpaths in batches and shell scripts is a real mess. Whereever
I have complex class paths and don't have to use scripts (production
environment, launcher tools like wlservice etc), I use Ant to set all the
application and vm parameters, classpaths, etc.. Ant offers an easy to
maintain way of setting and  especially maintaining classpaths. This is much
more convenient than working on an unstructured
one-line-twelvehundred-characters file or concatenating environment
variables. My system classpath is usually perfectly empty and unset as I
often experienced problems with colliding jars before. Therefore for me
'ignore' seems to be the natural setting.

Daniel