[Kaffe] does anyone care about this jar feature?

[Tony Kimball]

Quoth Moses DeJong on Wed, 10 February:
: 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.

These are the reasons that strike me off the top of my head:

1.  That is how tar does it.  jar is a tar-compatible interface to
    zip.  Violating that compatibility renders it more nearly superfluous.

2.  .class files can be produced by many different means.  Introducing
    a requirement that they should be written to an intermediate file
    will impose a gratuitous performance restriction on such means:
    You can't use jar in a pipe.  To see the performance implication,
    time building kaffe with and without -pipe in the gcc command
    line.

3.  .class files can be produced by many different means.  Introducing
    a requirement that they should be written to an intermediate file
    will prevent the use of appliances with no filesystem to produce
    .class files.