On a recent JDK, the system property sun.boot.class.path includes:
.../jre/lib/i18n.jar
.../jre/lib/sunrasign.jar

Neither of these are actually found in, say a Merlin or later JDK.
It appears that i18n.jar was renamed to charsets.jar at some point.

I assume the obsolete jars are maintained in the hotspot source code
for compatibility with ancient class libraries. But support for old class
libraries should not leak out to to anything user visible, like the
sun.boot.class.path system property. The boot class path should be
set to a more correct value, perhaps by checking for the existence
of jar files on disk. Or perhaps the class libraries can "fix up"
the value on behalf of the VM.

There might be performance advantages as well to cull the non-existent
elements of the boot class path.
###@###.### 2005-1-31 20:26:39 GMT