I was fixing 4232922 which complains that if you invoke
"java -jar doesntexist.jar" then you get a lame error
message. I fixed the launcher so it does an ExceptionDescribe.
The error message was still not useful:

$ java -jar doesntexist.jar
Exception in thread "main" java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
        at java.util.zip.ZipFile.open(Native Method)
        at java.util.zip.ZipFile.<init>(ZipFile.java, Compiled Code)
        at java.util.jar.JarFile.<init>(JarFile.java, Compiled Code)
        at java.util.jar.JarFile.<init>(JarFile.java, Compiled Code)

The problem is that ZIP_Open in zip_util.c does:

  zip->fd = JVM_Open(name, O_RDONLY, 0);
if (zip->fd == -1) {
freeZip(zip);
return 0;
}

Before return 0 there should be a call to JVM_GetLastErrorString.
However the fix isn't straightforward because the interface of
ZIP_Open seems broken. It passes in a char** instead of a (char*, int)
which seems very lame--the caller should be say where to place the
error message. What we have in an impendence mismatch between the
interface of ZIP_Open and the interface of JVM_GetLastErrorString.

anand.palaniswamy@Eng 1999-04-28