Bill de hÓra tells another classpath related horror story. This time its having multiple incompatible versions of a jar in the classpath. Problems like this are why I think that a solution to the classpath problem has to address both the source level and the binary level. In the discussions on Ruper (which seem to have petered out), people were arguing that we only need to solve the problem at the project specification level (via the Maven POM or the Centipede equivalent). But Bill's problem shows that we need to also solve the problem for binaries. In fact, Bill proposes Jar manifest annotation as part of a solution to this problem. Which is exactly what jardeps does.

Steve Conover seized on Bill entry as an opportunity to write a tool that finds duplicate classes in the classpath. This is great. Now we still need a way / place to get all of this stuff together in one place so that people can deal with classpath problems.