Could not find or load main class org.hsqldb.cmdline.SqlTool when launching hsqldb-sqltool

[Michael von Glasow]

To reproduce:

1. Ensure libhsqldb-hava and hsqldb-utils are installed.
2. Open a terminal window and run hsqldb-sqltool

Alternatively:

1. Start HSQLDB in server mode
2. Try to stop the running instance by running:
java -cp $CLASSPATH:/usr/share/java/hsqldbutil.jar:/usr/share/java/hsqldb.jar "org.hsqldb.cmdline.SqlTool" --inlineRc=url=jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost/$DB_NAME,user=SA,password= --sql="SHUTDOWN;"

Expected result:

I get the HSQLDB command-line interface (or at least a message about missing parameters). For the alternative use case, the DB shuts down.

Actual result:

In both cases, the CLI fails to launch with the following error:

    Error: Could not find or load main class org.hsqldb.cmdline.SqlTool
    Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.hsqldb.cmdline.SqlTool

Additional information:

This worked without issues on Ubuntu 18.04 but stopped working after I upgraded to 20.04. I suspect there is something wrong with the JARs in the libhsqldb-java package on 20.04.

Looking at the contents of libhsqldb-java, I see it installs two jar files: hsqldb-2.4.1.jar and hsqldbutil-2.5.0.jar. This looks to me as if the two JARs are taken from different versions. As Fred Toussi (maintainer of HSQLDB) writes at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65514193/hsqldb-command-line-shutdown-no-longer-works-after-upgrade, mixing JARs from different releases will not work properly.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: libhsqldb-java 2.5.0-1build2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-56.62-generic 5.4.73
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-56-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.14
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: MATE
Date: Fri Jan 1 15:45:56 2021
Dependencies: libservlet-api-java 4.0.1-2
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-12-09 (2214 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu MATE 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" - amd64 (20141023)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: hsqldb
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2020-11-17 (44 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Christian Sarrasin (sxc731)]

A manual workaround that works on Jammy: https://stackoverflow.com/a/71350461/645016