[Orgmode] Error running ditaa

[Dov Grobgeld]

When running ditaa on Linux fedora 12 through java, I get the following errors:

java -jar /usr/share/java/ditaa.jar -r -S /tmp/org-ditaa27392h-V blue_fd02b5c06d6a5cb80eaf27098c3c490dc81326ce.png
Picked up _JAVA_OPTIONS: -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/cli/ParseException
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.commons.cli.ParseException
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:217)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:205)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:319)
        at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:294)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:264)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:332)
Could not find the main class: org.stathissideris.ascii2image.core.CommandLineConverter. Program will exit.

This can be taken care of by using the shell script that comes with ditaa, i.e.:

ditaa  -r -S /tmp/org-ditaa27392h-V

But to do this from within emacs I need to patch org-exp-blocks.el as follows:

-    (unless (file-exists-p org-ditaa-jar-path)
-     (error (format "Could not find ditaa.jar at %s" org-ditaa-jar-path)))
:
-        (message (concat "java -jar " org-ditaa-jar-path " " args " " data-file " " out-file))
-        (shell-command (concat "java -jar " org-ditaa-jar-path " " args " " data-file " " out-file)))
+        (message (concat "ditaa " args " " data-file " " out-file))
+        (shell-command (concat "ditaa " args " " data-file " " out-file)))

(You also need to erase the checking for the existance of dita.jar)

Wouldn't it make more sense to replace the variable org-ditaa-jar-path with a new variable org-ditaa-command that by default contains "java -jar /old/value/of/org-ditaa-jar-path"? This would allow replacing it with a shell script. Would a patch be accepted, or do you prefer to remain backward compatible?

On a related question. Since there is quite a lot of common code between  org-export-blocks-format-dot and org-export-blocks-format-ditaa (especially if my patch is accepted), wouldn't it make sense to create a org-export-blocks-format-meta that take all the differences between the various export-blocks as parameters? This would simplify adding additional org-export-blocks.

Regards,
Dov