Re: 9.5: coping with loss of ditaa.jar

[Tim Cross]

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> On Sunday,  3 Oct 2021 at 07:25, Jarmo Hurri wrote:
>> 1. I am running Fedora 34, where ditaa is available as a
>>    package. However, just pointing org-ditaa-jar-path to the correct
>>    location /usr/share/java/ditaa.jar is not sufficient, because doing
>>    so leads to errors when trying to execute a ditaa babel block:
>
> On Debian 11 (bullseye, most recent stable version), this works just
> fine for me.  I didn't need to feed any parameters, as you have
> suggested being necessary.  I don't know why, mind you.  It could be a
> different version of ditaa.jar?  On Debian 11, the version installed is
> 0.10+ds1-1.2.

I suspect the difference is between having what Java calls a
'stand-alone' jar and a library jar.

With a 'stand-alone' jar, all dependencies needed by the java program
are bundled into the jar. With a library jar, only the specific code
that makes up the library is included. It is a little like static versus
dynamic linking of libraries. The idea is that with the lib only jar,
you would already have the library dependencies installed (via maven or
similar).

>From the OP's original post, my guess is the jar they had was only the
library, not a stand-alone jar with all the dependencies included. The
ditta release page holds both stand-alone and minimal lib jars from
memory. Most people will want the stand-alone version.