A nightmare would be if the system's Java 5 bits are older or newer
than those required by the application. The scenario with JRE files
in a subdirectory solves this. Since these files are only copied
but not installed they do not interfere with a possibly installed
JRE. I can't see a problem with this approach.
The 1.5.0_02 files you copied may depend on versions 10.4.0 to 10.4.2
of the OS. They will not work correctly with 10.4.3. With a
hypothetical 10.4.3, Apple ships a hypothetical 1.5.0_04 that only
works with 10.4.3 and higher, because only 10.4.3 and higher has a
fix for the dreaded exploding mouse bug.
So, yes, they do interfere, because Apple is not Sun, and MacOS X is
not Linux. Apple only targets certain OS versions with each
release. Sun targets lots of linux versions with each release.
Apple also does not support an embedded JDK, so if you manage to hack
theirs into working embedded, you are going against their OS design
and their license agreement. From a purely technical perspecitive,
this seems dreadfully unlikely to work, and terribly fragile, because
they likely had reasons for it. It is a big enough change that Apple
probably did not go through the extra work just for kicks and
grins. /usr/bin is there for Apple just like everyone else, so not
putting it there was extra work.
Sun could certainly write a JDK for the MacOS that works just like
that in Linux. Feel free to ask them, but they have not shown much
interest in doing so in the past.
If Apple's decisions bug you, file bugs at bugreport.apple.com, or
contribute to the Apache harmony project. Either of these may get
you a jdk you can embed, both legally and functionally.
As far as users not wanting a 30MB download, I suspect strongly that
JDK 1.5 will be part of a future dot release, and will be the default
JDK once Apple feels it is more stable than 1.4. Thus, no download
come the day.
Scott
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