Comment 4 for bug 294686

I'm having the same problem. In Ubuntu 8.04, I would be able to select a group of files, right-click and choose "Create Archive..." and from there give it a name and choose .war or .ear from the extensions drop-down. But after upgrading my distro to 8.10, now .war and .ear are not in the list of available extensions. Nothing changed in terms of my installed Java JREs/JDKs (unless the distro upgrade changed something?).

Also, if I open up file-roller from a command line, click on "New" and try to name a file something.war or whatever.ear, when I click the "Create" button it gives me this error:

Could not create the archive
Archive type not supported.

Now, to my knowledge the archive format of .war and .ear are the same as .jar (which is also in the .zip format), so I could create a .jar file and rename it, but as far as I'm concerned that's just a workaround to this issue. This was functionality that was in 8.04 and doesn't appear to be in 8.10, unless the 8.10 install modified something that can be changed back.

I ran sudo update-alternatives --config java and chose /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java, but that didn't seem to change anything.