New jre layout broke Maven and Ant

[Mark Derricutt]

There's an open maven-compiler-plugin bug to rewrite the compiler to use the "JSR-199 compiler api" [1] which has been available for some time now - rather than having a fixed dependency on the location of tools.jar.

This came up as part of another bug report about maven not recognizing the new javac 7 error message format [2].

Sadly it doesn't look like these changes will be made in the immediate future, so having some form of work around would be good as we can't really rely on bleeding-edge-not-yet-written-pluggins-for-project-xyandz.

I really don't see jigsaw solving this problem either - if anything, I'm sure that'll bring a lot more headaches to the game, using the compiler-api however would be the future proofing needed.

Mark


[1] http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MCOMPILER-144
[2] http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MCOMPILER-158



On 1/10/2011, at 2:58 PM, Jonathan Gibbons wrote:

> 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. And even then, it was easier for such tools to deal with the existing layout of existing JDK installations than to propose and deal with different ways to access everything.