README
1This directory contains the FastJar package, which is not part of GCC but
2shipped with GCC as convenience.
3
4=======
5FastJar 0.90
6
712/6/1999
8=======
9
10FastJar is an attempt at creating a feature-for-feature copy of Sun's JDK's
11'jar' command. Sun's jar (or Blackdown's for that matter) is written entirely
12in Java which makes it dog slow. Since FastJar is written in C, it can create
13the same .jar file as Sun's tool in a fraction of the time. On my system,
14Sun's jar takes 50 seconds to create a 10MB jar file, while FastJar only takes
15a little over a second.
16
17The reason I wrote fastjar is that building .jar files is a regular process
18of the build where I work. The way we have it setup, you have to re-create
19the .jar file everytime you want to test it out, which is about every 5 minutes
20when I'm busy coding. The .jar file wasn't -that- big, but it did take about
2130 seconds to be made, and watching all the garbage collection messages was
22pretty irritating as well. I probably wasted a half-hour a day watching
23Sun's jar tool chug along. By writing the program in C, I spend much less time
24banging my head against the monitor waiting for the build to finish. Yay!
25
26FastJar has been tested on Solaris and Linux 2.2.x systems and nothing else.
27It should compile/run without any problems on either system, provided you have
28zlib installed.
29
30Please mail any bug reports to burnsbr@ucs.orst.edu.
31
32If you use FastJar and want me to add the rest of the features, send me mail
33(toast@users.sourceforge.net). I'll be much more likely to put more work into this
34if I know other people find it useful other than me.
35
36As always, this not being a final release, bugs may exist. I test each
37release pretty well, but I can always miss things...
38
39Compression will slow things down quite a bit. A 10MB jar file takes about
401 second on my machine without compression, and 9 seconds with it. If you
41want fastjar to be fast, use the -0 (zero, not O) flag to turn off compression.
42
43Supported flags:
44--------------------------
45-c | create a new archive
46-v | verbose output
47-f | specify archive file name
48-m | specify existing manifest file
49-M | don't create manifest
50-0 | store only
51-C | change to dir
52-t | list contents
53-x | extract contents
54
55Unsupported flags:
56----------------------------
57-u | update exisiting archive
58
59If you use the "unsupported" flags, nothing bad will happen, but then again
60nothing will happen at all.
61
62
63Unsupported features (in this release):
64---------------------------------------------
65 * updating
66 * full manifest support (?)
67
68Order or features for the future:
69--------------------------------------------
70 * archive updating
71 * full manifest support
72 * filtering
73 * dependency checking
74
75
76===========================================================================
77http://fastjar.sourceforge.net
78toast@users.sourceforge.net
79