Glenn Holmer wrote:
On Thursday 02 June 2005 21:37, Kornelis Sietsma wrote:
Glenn Holmer wrote:
What is up with the insane tangle of symlinks that makes up jpackage??! I remember how easy it used to be just to change the link /usr/lib/java and everything would be good. I don't find any documentation on how to do this anymore.
On my system to completely switch I update "java", "javac", "java_sdk_sun" and "jre_sun" (I'm not totally clear on what the last two do by the way :)
The problem is that there are so many symlinks in /etc/alternatives (jar, appletviewer, rmic, keytool, javaws, javadoc, etc. etc.). I wish there were a way to switch them all over in one go.
Changing the "java" and "javac" groups will change all of their slave packages as well, updating all those symlinks with two commands. The "java_sdk_sun" and "jre_sun" groups change one or two symlinks each, from memory, I'm not sure what they are for but included them for completeness. but running "update-alternatives" four times will change *all* the symlinks, and do so in a way that should be compatible with all jpackage.org java packages. The jpackage.org stuff is pretty nice, imho, though it has the problem that a huge number of other tools assume that Java software is packaged as it comes from Sun or whoever distributes it - for example, I don't use the jpackage/SuSE version of Tomcat, even though it gives nice system integration, as it breaks some tools that assume Tomcat files are all in exactly the right places (specifically, appFuse :) even with the mass of symlinked directories provided. But generally, it's a good way to integrate java tools and applications into Linux, and is rapidly becoming a "standard", albeit one that Sun seem uninterested in supporting... - Korny -- Kornelis Sietsma e-mail: korny at my surname dot com