[Kaffe] does anyone care about this jar feature?

[Moses DeJong]

Hi all.

I am in the middle of implementing a kaffe.tools.jar.Jar class
to replace the sun.tools.jar.Main class from Sun that Kaffe
currently uses. I have run into a "feature" of the Sun impl
that is not well documented so I really doubt that anyone is
using it. The "feature" is the ability to read and write jar
files from stdin and stdout if not -f flag is given to jar.
Please keep in mind that this does not change "normal"
operation of the jar program (with files on the cmd line).


(Normal way to use jar)

jar -cf file.jar file1 file2 file3

jar -xf file.jar



But the Sun implementation will also read a jar file from stdin
if not -f flag is given like so.

jar -x < file.jar


To be perfectly honest, I do not think this is a feature that
anyone should be using and I would rather not add it to my
implementation because it causes a number of other "problems".
Does anyone think that this feature is worth adding? If you
can think of some good reason why this might be a good feature
to have please post it to the list so I know where you stand.
Please, no "that is how Sun does it" posts.


later
mo dejong
dejong at cs.umn.edu