Bug#291157: ant: is JAVA_HOME really necessary for JDK functionality?

[Charles Fry]

Package: ant
Version: 1.6.2-2
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

After having done a clean re-install of my system, I can't help but
wonder whether ant's JDK functionality truely requires that JAVA_HOME
be set by the user.

I realize that the details are skim, but I stumbled across:

   http://www.ozone-db.org/ozone-users/11-2000/msg00087.html

which claimed that with newer JDKs JAVA_HOME could be determined even if
it wasn't set.

Even if this couldn't be handled in the absolutely general case, perhaps
it could at least be made to work automatically with one of the standard
Debian JDKs, or with one installed with java-package.

Charles

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (90, 'testing'), (80, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.26-1-686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)

Versions of packages ant depends on:
ii  libant1.6-java            1.6.2-2        Java based build tool like make --
ii  libxerces2-java           2.6.2-1        Validating XML parser for Java wit
ii  sun-j2sdk1.5 [java-virtua 1.5.0+update01 Java(TM) 2 SDK, Standard Edition, 
ii  sun-j2sdk1.5debian [java- 0.18           Debian specific parts of Java(TM) 

-- no debconf information