New jre layout broke Maven and Ant

[Jonathan Gibbons]

Johannes,

Perhaps I chose my words poorly.   I meant to say that the questions
about tools.jar and the internal layout of JDK and automatically
putting tools.jar on the classpath were all more appropriate all those
years ago, when this was all first put in place.

Going forward, Jigsaw will address the more general problem of
"classpath hell". The Jigsaw team are aware of compatibility issues
and will support some sort of legacy mode. But that's getting way
off topic for this alias, so I suggest that further discussion on this
topic should be on the jigsaw-dev alias.

-- Jon

On 09/30/2011 11:08 PM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi Jonathan,
>
> On Fri, 30 Sep 2011, Jonathan Gibbons wrote:
>
>> Your questions are about N years out of date, where N is somewhere
>> between 5 and 15 :-(
>>
>> Originally, the only clients of tools.jar were JDK tools like javac,
>> javah, etc, and they had launcher support so there was no issue. It's
>> only with the advent of additional tools that want to get direct API
>> access to tools like javac that we have an issue with folk wanting
>> direct access to tools.jar.
> Funny. That last sentence of yours disagrees 100% with the first sentence.
> all within 8 lines, no more!
>
> Ciao,
> Johannes
>
> P.S.: I guess that my point is that reality disagrees not only with the
> first sentence, but also with breaking expectations. There is no good
> excuse for that, either ("fixing the design" does not do the job, it does
> not matter to anybody whose code all of a sudden breaks without their
> doing).
>
> P.P.S.: Please note that I did not cull any context; since it was
> top-posted, there was no context to cull.