Blogging Ottinger (tim)What Linux Programmer should know about Java
I lost an insane amount of time this week to Eclipse and Java and FitNesse. The latest snafu turned out to be all because of one little fact that was not obvious to me and which every Linux programmer should know:
Java paths don’t know jack about ~ (home dir).
Do not expect to set any paths in any java program relative to your home that way. At least in my setup, Java doesn’t know what tilde means, and doesn’t know why it can’t find anything when there’s a tilde in the path. It’s an embarrassing thing to be stuck on, but if you don’t know and the error messages aren’t really useful, you’re down to debugging by permutation.
Arbitrarily changing things to see if it “fixes” a configuration problem is an open-ended operation. It can take ten seconds or three days, and when you “fix” it you might not know why it works or whether it is really fixed. This is not engineering, it’s slapdash amateurism (in the most pejorative sense) but sometimes one has to stoop to that when one has more troubles than knowledge, support, and access to help.
Okay. Enough of that. I feel dirty. I wish I’d read that somewhere instead of having to wade through it.
