Strange behaviour during javaws -about

[Omair Majid]

On 02/18/2011 09:38 AM, Jiri Vanek wrote:
> Can you anybody check it?
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=677334
>
> regards J

I wanted to thank you for bringing up issues that first-time users are 
likely to run into. First impressions are important and all your points 
are valid.

Andrew Hughes may know more about this than I do, but I dont think we 
want to backport these changes to IcedTea6's netx - IcedTea6's netx is 
mostly receiving security fixes at this point. Most of the actual work 
is being done in icedtea-web. As such, I believe we should fix things in 
icedtea-web (only).

Also, please be careful when making changes to files hosted on 
icedtea.classpath.org - the changes may break javaws. Please discuss 
things on this mailing list first.

As for updating the things that javaws -about shows, that sounds like a 
great idea.

Personally, I dont think running an online application for showing the 
about dialog is a great idea. A user using a particular version of 
icedtea-web would want to see information about that particular version 
(and not the version that just happens to be on icedtea.classpath.org). 
If anything, I think javaws -about should launch the local version about 
about. (This also takes care of the problem that we ship an about.jar 
that's completely unused!)

As for security permissions, I agree that we should remove 
all-permissions it if it's not absolutely necessary.

That said, I do think the permissions are required by the about 
application as it currently stands. 
extra/net/sourceforge/jnlp/about/Main.java contains these two lines:
import net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher;
import net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.JNLPRuntime;
while JNLPRuntime executes these two lines before about.jnlp gets a 
chance to run:        Security.setProperty("package.access", 

     Security.getProperty("package.access")+",net.sourceforge.jnlp");
So I believe the about application will throw security exceptions on 
start if it does not have full permissions.

Thanks again for raising these issues; even more for volunteering to fix 
them :)

Cheers,
Omair