Re: Why is openoffice in Contrib?
On Tuesday 10 Dec 2002 8:06 pm, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 01:40:12PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 01:13:13PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> > > Secondly, since OpenOffice seems to be GPL'd, I am wondering why it is
> > > in contrib instead of main.
> >
> > Build-dependency on Java.
>
> [snip]
>
> Excuse me for butting in here, but aren't there GPL'd Java compilers in
> main already? Or does OpenOffice require a non-DFSG Java compiler?
The GPLd compilers are very good, and very complete, jikes for instance.
However without the class libraries they are fairly useless, and currently
there is no suitable free implementation. GNU CLasspath and kaffe have
extensive, but incomplete implementations. There is currently some major
effort, with some guys from redhat i believe, to get openoffice buildable
with kaffe (i cant remember if its anything, or specifically kaffe).
Run time dependencies are fine for debian policy, so we are almost there, just
got to get those build dependencies fixed :)
Hope this fills in the details for you.
Tom
Reply to: