Re: 9.5: coping with loss of ditaa.jar

[Tim Cross]

Jarmo Hurri <jarmo.hurri@iki.fi> writes:

> Greetings.
>
> Let me collect the suggested responses with their merits and potential
> issues.
>
> 1. Use ditaa.jar that comes with your operating system. Perfect if this
>    works. Seems to work e.g. in Debian, does not seem to work with
>    Fedora. Perhaps because one is a standalone library and the other one
>    is not. Could also be a version number issue.
>
> 2. Use the program "ditaa" (not ditaa.jar) that comes with your
>    operating system. This _may_ work, but I have not been able to misuse
>    the settings in ob-ditaa widely enough yet to create a working
>    solution.
>
> 3. Copy ditaa.jar from previous version of org. Works in the short run,
>    but I do not think we want to advocate this: "We took ditaa.jar out
>    of org, so you will want to download an earlier version of org to
>    make ditaa work."
>
> 4. Use precompiled binary ditaa.jar from some site. Will probably work,
>    but me and some other paranoids try to avoid using binaries from
>    sources which we do not consider reliable.
>
> 5. Compile ditaa.jar yourself. At least for me, does not work at the
>    moment.
>

I think you missed one obvious solution - donwload the jar file from the
ditaa project homepage on sourceforge. This is what I did some years ago
(there has not been an update to ditaa since 2013) and I placed the jar
file in a lib folder on my system (completely separate from org, emacs
etc) and then just set the path in my init file. This has been in place
for me for at least 5 years (since I setup this computer) and has not
needed to be changed through many updates/upgrades of both org and
emacs.

I don't think you need to be paranoid about downloading the jar file
from the project homepage - either you trust the code or you don't. If
you don't trust the code, then even compiling it yourself adds no
additonal protection.