JAR files

[Timothy Stack]

hi,

I've been working on a small rewrite of the JAR file code in
kaffe/kaffevm/jar.* and I have some questions.  The new code is mostly
just a cleanup of the older stuff, the directory entries are read a
little faster and the entries are stored in a hash table instead of a
linked list.  The problem I'm having is that I'm trying to cache the
jarFile objects so that we don't have to reread them constantly, but I
don't know what the semantics are between the JAR files and the JVM.
Can the JAR files change while the JVM is running?  And if so, what
are we supposed to do?  There are also restrictions because the code
is used by java.util.ZipFile, so we have to handle generic zip files
and may not be able to specialize to the JAR files.   Also, if you
have any thoughts about things you wanted to add I'd appreciate
your input.

thanks,

tim stack