Re: Java and OpenOffice.org
Hi,
I'm a bit out of topic, but I think I can give some elements of answer...
Josh Triplett a écrit :
Bruce Byfield wrote:
And if anyone on the Debian OpenOffice Team would care to make other
comments, I'd appreciate hearing them, by all means.
I'm not a Debian maintainer, but I do builds for Linux PPC, on Debian
sid, for the french OOo project (as "laboratory" ).
The builds I do are : 1.1.x and 1.9.xx, in both en-US, fr and de, and
I'm using j2sdk1.3.1 from Blackdown, but 1.4.2 from IBM (not free) works.
Some additional information, as the person who originally did the work
to make Java optional around version 1.1.0. OO.o uses Java heavily, and
will unfortunately probably continue doing so.
Yes, and last changes are in this direction... (wizards, for example,
needs now Java).
Fixing it was a matter of conditionalizing all the usage of Java
functionality within the code, and changing the build system to use
other non-Java tools for working with XML files.
A lot of code actually needs java...
I personally don't mind that OO.o has support for Java plugins, and that
that support is disabled if you don't build with Java. What's annoying
is the addition of Java-based functionality to the core of OO.o, such
that major pieces of functionality are unavailable without Java (and due
to lack of testing, those pieces of functionality often break the
non-Java build).
Yes, sure. I have made the choice of "with java" builds, because the use
of java actually improve really how OOo1.9.xx builds and work.
As soon as gcj-4.0 works, I sure will change. At least for compare.
Getting the OO.o 2.0 prereleases to build without Java
is quite an endeavor; Chris Halls and others are working on that, and I
don't know what the status of that work is, but I know that it is due to
similar issues: unconditional use of Java functionality throughout OO.o.
If this can help you, the actual status is :
I have a ~ complete functionnal 1.9.79 Linux PPC ( as .deb ) without
java version, and I think Chris has too (or even better, probably). The
actual status of this version is unstable, close from beta.
I'm actually both trying to build 1.9.83 with Blackdown j2sdk1.3.1 *and*
without. The big problem is that 1.9.xx sources actually are needing
1.4.1 (minimum) j2sdk, and some Sun engineers help me to change this, to
adapt the build for j2sdk1.3.1.
The official choice is : for OOo2.0, just j2sdk1.3.1 must be sufficient
(not exactly the case yet).
FYI, I have always some modules non building, like wizards,xmlhelp, and
probably binfilters, but the work is actually in progres, and I hope
soon to solve this. Some issue are in good way to be solved.
One key issue is that all we can generally do is conditionally disable
things; actually *replacing* all the missing functionality with non-Java
equivalents would be a full-time job.
Absolutly. IMHO, I think this is just a question of time : gcj seems to
be a really good solution, but actually gcj-4.0 is needed, and for Linux
PPC, gcj-4.0 is broken in experimental. I'm just waiting for test it... :-)
It should probably already work on Linux Intel (not the time to test, sorry)
For example, Caolan Mac Namara ( and others, certainly ) is/are doing an
enormous work with gcj, to make it working, replacing a non free sdk.
I don't think the OpenOffice.org developers are really intentionally
trying to keep OO.o requiring Java;
yes :-)
HTH
Regards,
eric bachard
--
eric bachard <ericb@openoffice.org>
French OpenOffice.org Community contributor (build of french releases
for Linux PPC and Mac OS X / X11)
See : <http://fr.openoffice.org>
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