George, Harry G wrote:
Congratulations on a major OSS project. However...
In my role as the primary OSS focal for Boeing, I build hundreds of OSS
packages from source, on a lot of platforms. For example I built
OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 from source tarball on Linux. So I thought I was
ready for buiilding 2.0.4 on Linux. Nope, it now requires something
called unowinreg.dll. It won't even configure without that. This is a
pretty major change for a bump release (2.0.3 to 2.0.4). And it
doesn't make a Linux guy happy to be forced to use a ".dll" which
apparently has something to do with the MS Windows Registry.
To summarize the unowinreg.dll story thus far:
- The "Transparent Use of Office UNO Components" feature
(<http://udk.openoffice.org/common/man/spec/transparentofficecomponents.html>)
allows to build Java applications (via the SDK) that at runtime find an
OOo installation. These Java applications are platform independent.
However, to be able to find an OOo installation on Windows, these
applications need to read the Windows registry, which is not possible
with pure Java, but only via some native code (contained in
unowinreg.dll). Hence the SDK on every platform needs to contain
unowinreg.dll so that it can copy it into those Java applications built
via the SDK (so that those Java applications indeed run on every
platform, regardless on which platform they have been built).
- Until SRC680m180, a pre-built version of unowinreg.dll had been
checked into CVS as odk/bin/win/unowinreg.dll, so that the SDK could
easily be built on every platform.
- That was changed through
<http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=49718>: The
checked-in unowinreg.dll was removed and a mingw cross compiler to build
unowinreg.dll on the fly was made a necessary prerequisite (for
non-Windows platforms at least). Since the mingw prerequisite is quite
heavy for somebody who wants to build OOo, a pre-built version of
unowinreg.dll has been made available on the Web for download as an
alternative prerequisite. This whole change was highly controversial
(though I currently can't remember on which lists it was discussed,
maybe somebody else can provide links).
I can see three approaches to remove the problems seen by Harry and others:
1 Redo issue 49718 so that the mingw cross compiler prerequisite is
removed and a pre-built unowinreg.dll is checked into CVS again and used
at build time on at least those platforms where it cannot be built on
the fly without adding additional prerequisites.
2 Offer configuration support to build a crippled SDK that does not
contain unowinreg.dll. (Changes to the SDK would be necessary so that
the resulting SDK would warn etc. when building Java applications that
would need the missing unowinreg.dll.)
3 Offer (working) build support to only build an OOo and not an SDK.
-Stephan
[...]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
