What is an adequate "existing LibreOffice installation" for extension development?

[David Johnson]

>>>On 10.01.20 18:09, David Johnson wrote:
>>> The environment I work in:
>>> 
>>> Ubuntu 19.10
>>> LibreOffice 6.3.3.2
>>> 
>>> The LibreOffice SDK requires a path to a LibreOffice installation:
>>> 
>>> "*OFFICE_HOME*: Path to an existing LibreOffice installation, e.g. 
>>> "/opt/libreoffice8". Be sure that it is not a user installation only."
>>> 
>>> My question: can I use the LibreOffice that is in the Ubuntu repository 
>>> for this purpose?
>>> 
>>> In other words, will the following suffice:
>>> 
>>> $ sudo apt-get install libreoffice
>>> 
>>> and then I tried to find the installation directory, which seems to be:
>>> 
>>> /usr/lib/libreoffice/
>>
>>yes and no.
>>
>>if you install the SDK from Ubuntu repository too then you have to use
>>the Ubuntu libreoffice package. i'm not sure what it's called; in Fedora
>>it's "libreoffice-sdk".
>
>Why is that so? (I pose this question just for improving my understanding of the whole process.) If you manually download an SDK version (so from The Document Foundation (TDF) site) that is compatible with the LibreOffice that is in the repository of a given Linux distribution, shouldn't that also work?
>
>I did grep through the Ubuntu repositories and I found:
>
>libreoffice-dev - office productivity suite -- SDK -- architecture-dependent parts
>
>That looks quite promising.

In the meanwhile I have tried installing the libreoffice-dev package -- with success! It turns out doing this installed all the required libraries/headers needed. Now, the LibreOffice extension examples seem to compile successfully.

>>if you install the SDK from TDF upstream packages you have to install
>>LibreOffice from TDF upstream packages.
>>
>>> Is this adequate? Or is this "only a user installation"?
>>
>>i'm not sure what "user installation" refers to here, but possibly it is
>>the user configuration directory, cf. soffice -env:UserInstallation=...
>
>Thanks for the tip! Perhaps someone else can confirm this? If the semantics of "user installation" is not clear to you, then it is definitely not clear to a humble beginner in LibreOffice extension development (like me ;-( ).

I now also think I know what they mean with "user installation". In probably all  Linuxdistributions, many applications have two variants, a normal variant and a "developer's" variant. In Ubuntu these carry the postfix "-dev". See:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1157192/what-do-the-dev-packages-in-the-linux-package-repositories-actually-contain

I think that https://api.libreoffice.org/docs/install.html uses the phrase "user installation" to refer to the non-developer variant of the application in the package repository. For an experienced Linux developer this may clear, but I think many people would be helped if this would be explained a bit more. (Something like: "Install the developer's package of LibreOffice that is present in the repository of your Linux distribution, or install LibreOffice manually from ... . Examples of developer's packages on several distro's are: Ubuntu: libreoffice-dev; Fedora: libreoffice-sdk, etc.")