Re: The fate of ditaa.jar (9.4.5.)

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

"Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de> writes:

> Russell Adams <RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.Com> writes:
>
>> On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 02:28:57PM +0300, Jarmo Hurri wrote:
>>> I pulled the latest master and noticed that contrib has been moved into
>>> a separate repository. I also cloned this contrib repository, but can
>>> not find the file
>>>
>>> scripts/ditaa.jar
>>>
>>> in the repo. In fact, there is no directory scripts in the repo.
>>
>> I actually never considered this might be packaged with Org. I always
>> thought I had to install it separately, like my Latex distribution or
>> PlantUML.
>
> Bundling this makes ditaa code blocks just work. Otherwise they won’t
> work on every org-install.

The user still needs a Java runtime installed on his/her compute, so
bundling ditaa.jar gives no guarantee at all that ditaa blocks will just
work on every org-install.

Instead a less informaed user, not used to run java programs, might be
left with a not working application that fails silently or to the user
incomprehensible error message.

Better to point user to ditaa's sources/releases and inform it is
optional with org. That way non-informed user will have to install java
and ditaa and will at least have an idea where to look when things go wrong.