Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need? [and LibreOffice crash]
Michael Stahl wrote: actually now i tried it out and the crash was pretty trivially fixed with commit d360477d8740f29e2c2bc5f7bbd667df7cd26ee9 This is great! It works! So now I have one more way to process a document headless. And now no weird window will be created. Code for reading a document: textdoc = ServiceManager.createInstance(com.sun.star.text.TextDocument) loadURL = systemPathToFileUrl(realpath(test.odt)) inProps = (PropertyValue(URL, -1, loadURL, 0), PropertyValue(FilterName, -1, writer8, 0)) textdoc.load(inProps) print(textdoc.Text.String) textdoc.close(True) Code for writing a document: textdoc = ServiceManager.createInstance(com.sun.star.text.TextDocument) textdoc.initNew() textdoc.Text.String = Hello World from initNew() saveURL = systemPathToFileUrl(realpath(test.odt)) outProps = PropertyValue(Overwrite, -1, True, 0), # 1-tuple textdoc.storeAsURL(saveURL, outProps) textdoc.close(True) Even with a non-headless LO start (but with --nologo --nodefault) no window is created. -- Piet van Oostrum p...@vanoostrum.org WWW: http://pietvanoostrum.com/ PGP key: [8DAE142BE17999C4] ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
On 03/30/2015 09:54 PM, Tor Lillqvist wrote: OK, so after trying out the --invisible switch, I don't think it is that super-useful after all, if all it does is make the soffice process wait invisibly for the first UNO client to connect, but has no effect after that. When the first client tells LO to open a document, it opens (visibly). That is as expected. But if I then close the document, the start centre shows up. I would have expected the soffice process to go back to the invisible state, with no windows showing, when it has no documents open. I guess that's a regression, given --invisible is much older than the various iterations of when exactly to show or not show the start center (which started out as a Mac-specific thing and then spread from there). ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
Is it in fact so that nowadays --quickstart does what --invisible is supposed to do? (Note that just starting soffice with the --quickstart option has nothing to do with whether that happens automatically when you log in or not.) If I start soffice with --quickstart and --accept, nothing is displayed (like with --invisible). If I connect with a UNO client that opens a document, closes the window, the process stays running (unlike with --invisible). Maybe we should in fact just make --invisible a synonym for --quickstart? --tml ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
On 03/31/2015 12:15 PM, Tor Lillqvist wrote: Is it in fact so that nowadays --quickstart does what --invisible is supposed to do? (Note that just starting soffice with the --quickstart option has nothing to do with whether that happens automatically when you log in or not.) If I start soffice with --quickstart and --accept, nothing is displayed (like with --invisible). If I connect with a UNO client that opens a document, closes the window, the process stays running (unlike with --invisible). Maybe we should in fact just make --invisible a synonym for --quickstart? While --quickstart indeed visually behaves similar to --invisible, it also actually starts the quickstart service (where available) and thus defeats XDesktop.terminate, unlike --invisible. ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
While --quickstart indeed visually behaves similar to --invisible, it also actually starts the quickstart service (where available) and thus defeats XDesktop.terminate, unlike --invisible. Sounds like --quickstart is more of a persistent server mode then? Could be;) If you want to run a server LibreOffice, and want to be sure that no client accidentally shuts it down, is --quickstart (coincidentally) how you should start it, not --invisible? --tml ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 05:03:38PM +0300, Tor Lillqvist wrote: Sounds like --quickstart is more of a persistent server mode then? Could be;) If you want to run a server LibreOffice, and want to be sure that no client accidentally shuts it down, is --quickstart (coincidentally) how you should start it, not --invisible? --tml Oh how I would like to run a persistent LO server that scales well with the number of connections... :) (Off topic though.) Jens -- Jens Tröger http://savage.light-speed.de/ ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 02:43:56PM +0200, Stephan Bergmann wrote: On 03/31/2015 12:15 PM, Tor Lillqvist wrote: Is it in fact so that nowadays --quickstart does what --invisible is supposed to do? (Note that just starting soffice with the --quickstart option has nothing to do with whether that happens automatically when you log in or not.) If I start soffice with --quickstart and --accept, nothing is displayed (like with --invisible). If I connect with a UNO client that opens a document, closes the window, the process stays running (unlike with --invisible). Maybe we should in fact just make --invisible a synonym for --quickstart? While --quickstart indeed visually behaves similar to --invisible, it also actually starts the quickstart service (where available) and thus defeats XDesktop.terminate, unlike --invisible. Sounds like --quickstart is more of a persistent server mode then? -- Jens Tröger http://savage.light-speed.de/ ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
I our company, on Windows machines, it is used regularly to convert file formats (xls to odf/pdf) without user interaction, without any signs of being broken. Yeah, which is why I said to some degree. It's not the situations and combinations that work that are interesting, but those that don't. --tml ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
RE: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
Hi tml, On Linux (and other X11-using Unixes), --headless is tightly coupled to the 'vclplug' concept, as there used to be a 'headless' (actually called 'svp') vclplug that was used (instead of a generic X11, GTK or KDE one) in headless mode. Nowadays the 'svp' code is not technically a vclplug any more, but that is just an implementation detail. On Windows and OS X, --headless support is presumably broken to some degree. I our company, on Windows machines, it is used regularly to convert file formats (xls to odf/pdf) without user interaction, without any signs of being broken. Winfried ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
Hi, Thank you Tor for starting this discussion; very interesting and necessary. I've been confused about these different modes for a while, in particular because I run on both Mac and Linux where the same switch works differently. I use LO for document analysis (not conversion), i.e. I need to load a document and poke its styles and also extract some content. This *should* run without any GUI because we don't even have the X libs installed on Linux; works ok so far. That exact same approach on Mac *always* pops open a window, which has irritated me for a while. Good you mention that this might be broken. Another question that arose from these switches is the server mode in general. I mean, when I run LO headless with a named pipe or socket port, then it becomes a server. However, it seems to scale poorly, and your mention of dialog/error boxes trying to disrupt the use makes me nervous. https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5t=74002 I was unable to find good documentation regarding headless mode, server mode, and interacting with LO in such an environment. Perhaps, to bring order into these various switches, it'll help to define use cases and use scenarios; then adjust and fix the switches accordingly. Cheers, Jens -- Jens Tröger http://savage.light-speed.de/ ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
OK, so after trying out the --invisible switch, I don't think it is that super-useful after all, if all it does is make the soffice process wait invisibly for the first UNO client to connect, but has no effect after that. When the first client tells LO to open a document, it opens (visibly). That is as expected. But if I then close the document, the start centre shows up. I would have expected the soffice process to go back to the invisible state, with no windows showing, when it has no documents open. --tml ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Popup dialogs (was How many degrees of headlessness do we need?)
On 30/03/2015 16:50, Jens Tröger wrote: Hi, Thank you Tor for starting this discussion; very interesting and necessary. I've been confused about these different modes for a while, in particular because I run on both Mac and Linux where the same switch works differently. Just throwing something completely off the wall into the mix ... and trained touch-typists the world over (not that there are that many left) would probably throw their arms around you and hug and kiss you for this ... Is there any way we could have a mode that would disable pop-up dialogs, auto-corrupt, etc etc. Touch typists are TRAINED NOT to look at the screen - a pop-up dialog plays havoc with that workflow. They want to be able to dump text from a paper document into a word-processor document. Bear in mind that a trained typist can do this accurately such that it OCR needs to be better than 95% accurate to do a faster job. That's what pisses me off about Word - it's aimed at the hunt-n-peck brigade - sure that's the majority of the market out there, but so many of its features are on-by-default, hard to disable, and a pain in the neck for the professional user. It would be nice to have a mode that says what you type is what you get!!! Cheers, Wol ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
If you run LO on the Mac as a service with --headless and you open a doc from a script with Hidden=True, Oh. I guess this Hidden=True needs to be counted as one more degree (or mode) of headlessness;) One that is specific to a document window. What happens if you haven't started LO with --headless, what effect does Hidden=True then have? no window will pop up. If the document is open long enough (for example if you put a sleep in the script) you can see from the doc that there is an invisible window. From the Dock you can open that window. I guess with open you mean un-minimize here? It does have the document filename as title, but it doesn't contain the document. It is a kind of strange window. Yeah, sounds odd indeed. The described can hardly be intentional, but must be seen as a bug. Here is a script that extracts the text from a Writer document. Thanks. I will experiment eventually. --tml ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
Jens Tröger wrote: I use LO for document analysis (not conversion), i.e. I need to load a document and poke its styles and also extract some content. This *should* run without any GUI because we don't even have the X libs installed on Linux; works ok so far. That exact same approach on Mac *always* pops open a window, which has irritated me for a while. Good you mention that this might be broken. If you run LO on the Mac as a service with --headless and you open a doc from a script with Hidden=True, no window will pop up. If the document is open long enough (for example if you put a sleep in the script) you can see from the doc that there is an invisible window. From the Dock you can open that window. It does have the document filename as title, but it doesn't contain the document. It is a kind of strange window. Here is a script that extracts the text from a Writer document. Start LO as /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice '--accept=socket,host=localhost,port=2002;urp;StarOffice.Servicemanager' --headless and run the script with LO's Python: import uno from unohelper import systemPathToFileUrl from com.sun.star.beans import PropertyValue from os.path import realpath localContext = uno.getComponentContext() resolver = localContext.ServiceManager.createInstanceWithContext(com.sun.star.bridge.UnoUrlResolver, localContext) context = resolver.resolve(uno:socket,host=localhost,port=2002;urp;StarOffice.ComponentContext) desktop = context.ServiceManager.createInstanceWithContext(com.sun.star.frame.Desktop, context) loadURL = systemPathToFileUrl(realpath(test.odt)) inProps = PropertyValue( Hidden , -1 , True, 0 ), # 1-tuple! textdoc = desktop.loadComponentFromURL(loadURL, _blank, 0, inProps); print(textdoc.Text.String) textdoc.close(True) -- Piet van Oostrum p...@vanoostrum.org WWW: http://pietvanoostrum.com/ PGP key: [8DAE142BE17999C4] ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
As far as I see, we have the following command-line options or other ways to avoid display of GUI elements: - The --quickstart switch. Starts a LO instance that *initially* has no GUI. But when the user then actually wants to use LO, it is that instance that wakes up and shows the GUI. When the user quits, the process stays running but goes back to showing no GUI. - The --invisible switch. Not much used? Exact semantics unknown. What is the intended interaction with existing LibreOffice instances, is there the normal IPC pipe thing going on, so that only one LO instance runs per user session? - The --headless switch. Perhaps newer than --invisible? Not sure why a separate one is needed and what the exact intended semantics are. Again, how is it supposed to affect the interaction with other LibreOffice instances? On Linux (and other X11-using Unixes), --headless is tightly coupled to the 'vclplug' concept, as there used to be a 'headless' (actually called 'svp') vclplug that was used (instead of a generic X11, GTK or KDE one) in headless mode. Nowadays the 'svp' code is not technically a vclplug any more, but that is just an implementation detail. On Windows and OS X, --headless support is presumably broken to some degree. Note that Application::EnableHeadlessMode takes a boolean parameter 'dialogsAreFatal', so this mode actually splits into two. - The Application::EnableConsoleOnly() and IsConsoleOnly() API. No command-line switch. Very new, from 2013. Used only in one program, gengal, for OS X. Not sure if actually does what Michael (who doesn't use OS X) thinks it does. Unclear why the 'headless' thing could not be used instead. (Yesterday I made EnableConsoleOnly() also call EnableHeadlessMode(true).) - LibreOfficeKit use of LO code. At least to me, it should be obvious that when some arbitrary program, possibly running as a daemon, as a web service, etc, uses LibreOfficeKit to handle documents, no LO GUI should ever be displayed. Currently LibreOfficeKit turns on 'headless', and since yesterday, also 'console-only'. This is a mess and needs clarification. There are five modes of headlessness. Do these modes form a hierarchy? Or is it possible, and meaningful, to have a LibreOffice instance that is headless but not invisible, for instance? Could we at least finally kill the quick start concept, which surely is outdated by now? Then there is also the issue that many (or all?) programs that use LibreOfficeKit should be able to run totally isolated from other processes using LO code (LO itself, or other instances of the same or other LOKit-using processes). There should be no inter-process communication. Perhaps even no reading or writing of user configuration. But this is a separate topic. --tml ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
On Mac we have the env variable VCL_HIDE_WINDOWS connected to 'PseudoHeadless' OK, so we have *six* modes of headlessness;) --tml ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 1:21 AM, Tor Lillqvist t...@iki.fi wrote: On Windows and OS X, --headless support is presumably broken to some degree. On Mac we have the env variable VCL_HIDE_WINDOWS connected to 'PseudoHeadless' the poor man version of headless achieved my preventing any Windows of 'showing' I added that to avoid the very annoying 'flashing' when the unit test are running on Mac. Norbert ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
Il 29/03/2015 08:21, Tor Lillqvist ha scritto: As far as I see, we have the following command-line options or other ways to avoid display of GUI elements: [snip] - The --invisible switch. Not much used? Exact semantics unknown. What is the intended interaction with existing LibreOffice instances, is there the normal IPC pipe thing going on, so that only one LO instance runs per user session? Looking at the code there's quite a lot of if that avoid calling OfficeIPCThread::ExecuteCmdLineRequests when libo is invoked with --invisible Telepathy has some knowledge of it for some reason. - The --headless switch. Perhaps newer than --invisible? Not sure why a separate one is needed and what the exact intended semantics are. Again, how is it supposed to affect the interaction with other LibreOffice instances? On Linux (and other X11-using Unixes), --headless is tightly coupled to the 'vclplug' concept, as there used to be a 'headless' (actually called 'svp') vclplug that was used (instead of a generic X11, GTK or KDE one) in headless mode. Nowadays the 'svp' code is not technically a vclplug any more, but that is just an implementation detail. On Windows and OS X, --headless support is presumably broken to some degree. [snip] This is a mess and needs clarification. There are five modes of headlessness. Do these modes form a hierarchy? Or is it possible, and meaningful, to have a LibreOffice instance that is headless but not invisible, for instance? Could we at least finally kill the quick start concept, which surely is outdated by now? I've googled a bit on libreoffice headless and invisible options usage on forums in the context of document conversion. Found just once occurence of invisible used alone at stack overflow, most of the time it's headless alone or headless and invisible together. So i'd just make it an alias of headless to avoid breaking scripts and mark it as deprecated in the help. thanks -- Riccardo Magliocchetti ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
I've googled a bit on libreoffice headless and invisible options usage on forums in the context of document conversion. Found just once occurence of invisible used alone at stack overflow, most of the time it's headless alone or headless and invisible together. So i'd just make it an alias of headless to avoid breaking scripts and mark it as deprecated in the help. Yep, that seems sensible to me, too. Will do that. Also, I will probably get rid of the ConsoleOnly thing, and instead call EnableHeadlessMode() in gengal and test IsHeadlessModeEnabled in SVMain(). (This will affect only OS X, as it is only on OS X that ImplSVMainHook() can return true.) BTW, despite the ConsoleOnly thing, gengal was still crashing on OS X when running with no access to the window system. That was because the [NSScreen screens] call in AquaSalGraphics::initResolution() naturally returned an empty NSArray, but the code anyway tried to get the 0th object of it. I fixed that today. Will push together with the other changes mentioned above once I have done some double-checking. --tml ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
Re: How many degrees of headlessness do we need?
Also, I will probably get rid of the ConsoleOnly thing, and instead call EnableHeadlessMode() in gengal and test IsHeadlessModeEnabled in SVMain(). (This will affect only OS X, as it is only on OS X that ImplSVMainHook() can return true.) On the other hand, it *is* documented in svapp.hxx what ConsoleOnly mode means, and it is in fact orthogonal to headlessness. (Used to disable Mac specific app init that requires an app bundle.) So using this in gengal (which indeed is not a program in an app bundle; only soffice is) makes sense. On the other hand, the change I did yesterday to check IsConsoleOnly() in OfficeIPCThread::EnableOfficeIPCThread() and OfficeIPCThread::execute() probably was wrong. That has nothing to do with whether the code is executing in an app bundle or not. Probably what I should be checking there is IsHeadlessModeEnabled(). Also the check for IsConsoleOnly() in OpenGLHelper::isVCLOpenGLEnabled() is probably not right, because whether OpenGL can be used or not has little do do with whether running in app bundle or not. Probably IsHeadlessModeEnabled() is the right thing to call there, too. --tml ___ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
