Jon Stevens wrote: > > If the above files do not exist, then attempt to look > for relative paths (ie: ../../jakarta-servletapi) to > the .jar files here: > > /jakarta-servletapi > /jsse* > /jmx* It is not clear to me why property files with reasonable defaults are "easy" whereas environment variables with the same defaults are "hard". It seems to me that the key discussion is what are reasonable defaults. Whatever. One difference between the way I am set up and they way you have described your setup is that I segregate the products that I have built from ones I have installed. This could easily be accomodated by having a single additional property/environment variable which specifies another root directory to search in. More substantially, I'm troubled by thoses asterisks, and I have a similar problem with jakarta-servletapi. I routinely have multiple copies of various products on my system. One case in point is jakarta-servletapi as I routinely build both tomcat3 and tomcat4. To enable this, I have two copies of servletapi, one named jakarta-servletapi-4.0. Clearly this can be addressed via a properties file, I just want to be sure that the build system doesn't do me a "favor" by tossing in additional, randomly selected things into my path without warning. - Sam Ruby