Specify jdk version in path independent way with ant builds with ConsoleLauncher

[mebigfatguy]

Hi folks we have an ant build that runs junit 5 tests, using org.junit.platform.console.ConsoleLauncher thru the <java> task.

our <javac> tasks use release="17" So the code is compiled with 17. I am asking for there is some similar thing that can be specified with ConsoleLauncher.

The reason for this, is we also use eclipse which requires jdk21. Thus in our systems we have jdk21, but then in eclipse we specify 17. we have tests that use SimpleDateFormat to parse a string like

"2/20/26, 2:00 PM"

and that works fine, because eclipse runs the tests in jdk 17

However from the command line, jdk21 is in force, and the defaulit en_US format has changed to remove the comma so

the above string fails to parse, we'd need to use

"2/20/26 2:00 PM"

It would be nice if ConsoleLauncher could enforce a version of the jdk in the running of tests, without having to specify paths which breaks across many users (unless you add more configurable properties which is messy.)

[marcphilipp]

I'm by no means an export using Ant. The problem you're describing is not specific to the console launcher, though. I'm not aware that Ant supports anything like Gradle's toolchains which would address the problem of being able to specify a JRE/JDK version for a <java> task. I think the best you can do is use a property for the Java home directory and include a user-specific properties file where that is supposed to be set.