[3504] in Release_7.7_team
Re: more Java plugin woes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (t. belton)
Tue Sep 17 12:12:06 2002
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 12:12:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: "t. belton" <tbelton@MIT.EDU>
To: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
cc: <facdev@MIT.EDU>, <release-team@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <200209162312.TAA17831@dit.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.33L.0209171202260.7790-100000@iphigenia.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Java makes me crazy. It is extremely unreliable, and too many teachers are
using it for critical apps when they shouldn't be.
Alex, the change you requested (below) is in and will propagate in the
usual fashion. If we absolutely need it today than we could get it into
the read-only infoagents quickly; I'm not sure there is a way to speed up
its getting into netscape.adjusted.
That change should have already been there; letting the user's existing
path override the one you're adding is good form in general, and I'm not
sure how or when it got botched. That is, I must have moved it to the end
of the line but I have no idea why.
I don't think special-casing by platform is going to help anything, not
unless you care to hard-code one platform to one older version of Java and
another platform to another older version. Is there some older version of
Java we can say is generally considered stable for everyone and
everything, make THAT the default, and tell people to use a local
NPX_PLUGIN override if they want something more bleeding edge?
And this doesn't even begin to deal with Mozilla, which lacks the
NPX_PLUGIN mechanism at all. If we need a local override there it will
probably have to be an edit to the mimeTypes.rdf file, and hopefully that
will trump the plugin (which, right now, uses 1.4.01 hard because I no
longer trust 'current' - I don't automatically want it to use the latest
Java because too often the latest Java is broken).
On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Alex T Prengel wrote:
>
> Continuing with our never-ending Java plugin woes- I just got an
> urgent Email from a course administrator:
>
> >I desperately need a way to configure Netscape on Athena to use an older
> >version (1.3.1_02) of the Java Plugin, rather than the newer 1.4.
>
> >I'm the system manager of Prof. Jesus del Alamo's Weblab project
> >(http://weblab.mit.edu/), which is being used by students for graded
> >coursework in 6.720 and 6.012 this semester (their first assignment is due
> >this Wednesday). This summer, we deployed a new graphical version of our
> >client applet, and tested it extensively on Athena and other platforms
> >under version 1.3.1_02 of the Java Plugin. At the time, we selected a
> >version by manually setting NPX_PLUGIN_PATH (without this, Netscape didn't
> >find the plugin at all). Unfortunately, the script in
> >/var/athena/infoagents/arch/share/bin/netscape.adjusted has recently been
> >modified to set NPX_PLUGIN_PATH for the *current* version of the Java
> >Plugin (now 1.4) in such a way that I don't see any obvious way to
> >override it.
> >
> >Our applet does not work at all well with version 1.4 of the plugin (it
> >crashes and hangs). Please let me know as soon as possible how to get
> >Netscape to use the earlier version of the plugin, so that I can pass the
> >information on to the 6.720 students.
>
> I think there's a way to deal with this with a minimal script change-
> in the current /var/athena/infoagents/arch/share/bin/netscape.adjusted
> script, can you change the lines:
>
> if [ "$uname" = "Linux" ] || [ "$uname" = "SunOS" ]
> then
> if test ${NPX_PLUGIN_PATH-undefined} = "undefined"
> then
> NPX_PLUGIN_PATH="/afs/athena.mit.edu/software/java/current/distrib/${ATHENA_SYS}/jre/plugin/${ATHENA_SYS}/ns4"
> else
> NPX_PLUGIN_PATH="/afs/athena.mit.edu/software/java/current/distrib/${ATHENA_SYS}/jre/plugin/${ATHENA_SYS}/ns4:${NPX_PLUGIN_PATH}"
> fi
> fi
>
> to:
>
> if [ "$uname" = "Linux" ] || [ "$uname" = "SunOS" ]
> then
> if test ${NPX_PLUGIN_PATH-undefined} = "undefined"
> then
> NPX_PLUGIN_PATH="/afs/athena.mit.edu/software/java/current/distrib/${ATHENA_SYS}/jre/plugin/${ATHENA_SYS}/ns4"
> else
> NPX_PLUGIN_PATH="${NPX_PLUGIN_PATH}:/afs/athena.mit.edu/software/java/current/distrib/${ATHENA_SYS}/jre/plugin/${ATHENA_SYS}/ns4"
> fi
> fi
>
> If you look close, all that is done is to move ${NPX_PLUGIN_PATH} to the front
> of the path and not the end in that case that this is defined already. This
> allows users to set NPX_PLUGIN_PATH in their environment, and have Netscape
> pick up that value by virtue of it being found first in the path. If they
> don't set it, it picks up the default "java/current" value.
>
> I tested it myself and it seems to work fine. Can you try it as soon
> as you can and implement it ASAP (unless I'm overlooking something)?
>
> Unfortunately this may need to be set conditionally on platform- as
> far as I recall java_v1.3.0 is the only 1.3 value that works reliably on Sun,
> and we didn't get a working Linux plugin until java_v1.3.1_01, I think.
>
> We're bound to get other problems like this- csnowden was working
> today on problems a faculty member started having after the switch to
> the 1.4.0_01 plugin.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Alex
>
