Re: 9.5: coping with loss of ditaa.jar

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

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.