[kaffe] javac dosen't work for me

[Dalibor Topic]

Hi Jukka,
--- Jukka Santala <jsantala@tml.hut.fi> wrote:
> On Fri, 24 May 2002, Godmar Back wrote:
> >> will silently fail. I thought this was fixed
> recently. Try if you can run
> >> java or kaffe HelloWorld, then with "unset
> CLASSPATH".
> > Jukka, I wasn't doubting that your error report
> was correct.
> > I was objecting to your insinuation that Kaffe was
> always this broken
> > when in 1.0.6 it wasn't.
> 
> I well know that it used to work, in fact in my
> original bug-report at
>
http://www.kaffe.org/pipermail/kaffe/2002-April/007892.html
> I stated it
> was a regression that'd appeared after last
> Christmas. But regardless, as
> it appears to now work, let's move on to more
> important things.

* how the regression came into place: While I tried to
get xsmiles 0.5 running, I had problems with resource
loading code in Character.CharacterProperties. It used
the system methods of finding resources, that relied
on URLClassLoader to do the job. Unfortunately, since
users can specify URLStreamHandlers, and thus
introduce  arbitrary code into the URL resolution
process, there were problems with code in user
supplied URLStreamHandlers trying to indirectly use
Character.CharacterProperties before it could be
initialized. My fix was to patch the resource loading
code in Character.CharacterProperties to operate
directly on the classpath without consulting
URLClassLoaders.

Unfortunately, I had not tested the code with bad
CLASSPATH settings, so the CLASSPATH examination loop
in my patch would bail out at the first bad entry,
instead of proceeding to look for the character tables
in other entries. Without loaded character tables
you'd  observe interesting but silent crashes. I fixed
that one :) but did not commit an updated Klasses.jar
at the time. I'll outline my reasons for not updating
Klasses.jar in a separate mail.

I hope this mail answers the remaining questions about
the CharacterProperties regression. I know that my
patch for the issue described above is an ugly hack ;)
and I'd welcome a better solution.

best regards,

dalibor topic

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