Perils of javac, part 2

[blahblahblahh]

Is anyone successfully using -sourcepath on 1.4.2_04?

I cannot get it to work at all just from a basic commandline. I can’t believe that Sun would not have a regression test for this: I can’t believe it’s actually broken!

But I’ve followed the docs exactly and it doesn’t work :(.

I get:

error: cannot read: source.java

With a subdirectory “src” containing a file called “source.java” which is not in any package. Doesn’t work even if source.java is in a package. Doesn’t work even if you place source.java in a subdirectory of the name of it’s package (itself in the subdiectroy “src”).

BUT if I move the file from the sourcepath into the current working directory, it works fine.

It seems that it’s just completely broken :(.

PS perhaps we could do with a new category “JDKs” for all issues relating to:

• new releases of java (1.4.2_04, 1.5 beta, 1.5 final etc)
• contentious: problems with JDK tools like this one (IMHO it should probably be dealt with on a more general java forum; however, sun’s JDC is absolutely vile as a user-experience so I sympathise with all those who don’t use it)
• discussions on the difficulties of getting people to download JRE etc
• discussions on the future of the JRE
• etc (there’s quite a lot of chatter on these topics…)

[blahblahblahh]

Sigh. Yes, it’s a bug. Yes, at least one Sun engineer has marked it as closed, won’t fix.

In fact the tool docs for javac are completely wrong (would like to throttle whoever is responsible for this):

Specify the source code path to search for class or interface definitions. As with the user class path, source path entries are separated by colons ( and can be directories, JAR archives, or ZIP archives. If packages are used, the local path name within the directory or archive must reflect the package name.

According to the closed bug reports, this is not true. In fact it is NOT to “search for class …definitions”; it is only to “search for class definitions that are imported by one or more of the source files specfied later on the command-line; sourcepath is ignored when trying to find the files specified later on the command-line”.