-Dants.debugFlags=ANTS_DANTE (etc.) is Evil (tm)

[Craig Milo Rogers <Rogers@ISI.EDU>]

	Hi.  In today's weekly ABOCC teleconference, we (the Activate
project at ISI and SRI) decided that the way that ANTS passes
command-line debugging flags is Evil (tm).  In the ABone, there's
a (theoretical) separation beteen ABone managers and EE devlopers.
The construct:

    -Dants.debugFlags=ANTS_DANTE

is limited to ABone managers, because "-D" can also be used for:

    -Djava.compiler=NONE

or, worse still, to change the VM's choice of Java security managers.

	We could parse the "-D" option in anetd, and exclude suspicious
values, but we consider that a fragile solution.

	Di you think it would be reasonable to make
"edu.utah.janos.nodeos.Main" to take flags (perhaps woth the same
syntax,) to set the debug flags before calling its own target class?
Thus, the ABoneShell permanent load command would be:

  pload J=http://bro.isi.edu/ANTS/ants2.0/~edu.utah.janos.nodeos.Main \
        T=${TYPE} D=T${TYPE} C=ANTS_2 R=err O=out V=${jdk} \
	S=-Dants.debugFlags=ANTS_DANTE \
        S=ants.core.ConfigurationManager S=core.config S=${vaddr}



					Craig Milo Rogers