[Libreoffice] de-emphasisig java ... - summary so far ...

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi Michael, *,

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 12:03 PM, Michael Meeks <michael.meeks at novell.com> wrote:
> [...]
> A. it makes LibreOffice easier to build, to not require Java
> [...]
>          I (personally) have had -tons- of weirdo java build issues
>          in the past, Lubos builds --without-java

I don't know who/what Lubos is, but in the time maintaining
tinderboxes/buildbot slaves on Mac and Linux, I never ever had weirdo
java build issues.
The only issue I had was on fedora rawhide and ant where configure
worked fine, but the environment file then created a conflict that
broke ant. But that was looong ago. - Granted, I use Apple's JDK on
the Macs, and mostly Sun's JDK on the linux ones (although the fedora
one used gcj)

So if there are any issues, they were not reported upstream (OOo at
the time) / not on lists I did read.

>                + Cloph points out that these are just bugs
>                        + that installing a JDK is easy

It was on any distro I did build in the past. Mandriva, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian.
All those provide different "flavors" of java (gcj, openJDK, Sun), and
I had no problem whatsoever.

> [...]
>        A. I believe it is un-arguable that by removing a large,
>           complex, fragile, version confused dependency we do indeed
>           make it easier to build.

I don't know what you mean with "version confused dependency" here.

>                        + Installing the (right) JDK is not easy - I
>                          often get it wrong

Honestly I'd be interested in how you can manage to not install a JDK properly.
Any distro has a corresponding java-devel or jdk or whatever package.
If installing that is not enough, then bring the corresponding problem
to the list, so that configure can handle such a situation more
gracefully.

As SuSE linux has been mentioned, it must be a speciality on that distro?

>                        + Broken builds hurt the newbies we need !
>                + Ergo as a minimum I would like to make it possible to
>                  detect some (any) badness in your Java environment:
>                  missing ant, junit, jre, javac of wrong version, etc.
>                  and simply automatically disable java. Also adding a
>                  some configure failure warnings saying "try using
>                   --without-java"

+1 to the first part, -1 to a generic "try using --without-java" when
anything goes wrong.
Either you can detect a problem wrt java (and the disable it
automatically and print the corresponding warning, or fail and suggest
to use --without-java), or you don't have a clue, but then the message
to try without-java is misleading, as very likely it won't be the
problem.

>        B. Some huge proportion of our user-base is Windows users, some
>           quarter of these will not have Java installed cf.
>           http://riastats.com/

Doesn't match my "neighbourhood", my experience though...
Also 25% don't have Java installed, I'd not say this is a "huge
portion", the intersection of those that would install LO very likely
shifted towards having java installed/available.

>                + ie. it is possible that we have more Windows users
>                  without Java, than Linux + Mac users together.

But it is more than clear that those users will then get the "This
function requires a JRE" notification. This hasn't been a problem in
OOo-land, so why should it be a problem for LO?
On exhibitions, many people had complaints about this or that, but I
don't remember people complaining about OOo and Java (apart from
Mac-users that were using NeoOffice at the time)

>                + Live-CD users (at least we get OO.o on ours) and their
>                  default install do not get the (big) Java beast, and
>                  neither does their default install image.

Don't start arguing with installer size please. calling java a big
beast and providing a 300+MB windows installer just doesn't fit.
Again: Users don't need the JDK, users need the JRE.
OOo 3.2.1 for windows
*WITH* JRE 148M
*WITHOUT* 134M

so 15MB - really a "huge beast"... But again: (IMHO) It should not be
shipped within the LO installer anyway  (On linux, the JRE adds about
20MB to the installer)

And yes, my notebook was installed from a live-CD as well, it didn't
include java on the installation media, but then again, there is no
problem installing it using the distro's package manager, just as you
would do with other stuff.

>           We cannot bundle the JRE (as Oracle do), and if the user goes
>           to download it, they have OpenOffice.org advertised to them.

I don't see a problem with that either. When people go for LO, they
very, very, very likely already know about OOo. And if they do: Why
should they care, they did just download/install LO, so they'll give
it a try anyway.

> [...]

Again no objections with replacing java-dependend stuff with
equivalent c++ code.
But definitely against ripping stuff out just for the sake of
it/Disabling stuff because there is no replacement yet

ciao
Christian