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Could you elaborate on the class path order issue?

I can think of pathologic cases where multiple jars contain the same class but only one version is the right one, but how can something like that happen in practice?

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A custom modding framework that patches code at runtime to dodge legal issues of binary patching, or more accurately shift the legal issues from us to end consumers. Companies don't pursue end consumers for things like that, or so I heard. Either way, problem was that the modding framework and the app itself shared a couple of libraries. Our modding framework used features of newer versions of libraries, features that the app with outdated libraries didn't have. Sometimes, the class path order put older versions of libraries first, causing the modding framework to use a class, function, etc. that doesn't exist in that version of the library yet. This rarely was an issue since most libraries didn't change much from version to version, but the class path lottery did have a few uncommon combos that made the app crash until you restart your computer.

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