"scala" script and classpaths

"Judson, Ross" <rjudson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> I put scala.jar on the regular classpath all the time and haven't had a
> problem.  Give it a try.

Right -- the scripts are for convenience.  If you are doing something
unusual, it's probably easiest to add the scala library's jar onto the
classpath of your system.


That said, we have been chatting the last few weeks about what exactly
the "scala" script should do.  The current behavior of the beta is
that the "scala2" script includes all jars in your classpath that it
finds in your sbaz directory.  This way, you can install jars using
sbaz, compile against them using scalac2 with no extra options, and
run linking against them using scala2 with no extra options.  This is
very convenient in practice.


It looks like the ideal solution, though, would be to go down a design
path like ELF on Unix.  With that kind of design, every jar would have
linkage information: what it provides, what it needs, what breadth of
versions it is compatible with.  When you run a program, what actually
runs first is a little linker program -- /lib/ld-linux.so on Linux --
that takes all the available hints into account and chooses which jars
to include on the classpath.

But, no one has put any time into putting such a thing together, so
the current situation is that the script is convenient for most
people, but you have to manage classpaths for ultimate control.

-Lex