[Libreoffice] Installing lang packs on Mac PPC

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi Alexander,*,

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Alexander Thurgood
<alex.thurgood at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> A user on the French mailing list has just related how he managed to
> overcome the problem of installing the French language pack on Mac PPC.
> There has been an issue with lang pack installation on this OS for a
> while now,

No, there has not been any issue "for a while now". Unless you or
anyone else reports a problem, there is no problem.

> [...]
> So, looking at mdfind attributes :
>
> ----------   1 root  wheel  22892 Mar 26  2005 /usr/bin/mdfind
>
> Ah, so not executable. A quick :
>
> chmod +x /usr/bin/mdfind

Hardly a problem with the languagepack then. Probably the user
followed some dubious "how to disable spotlight guide" on the web and
manually messed with the OS.

Disk Utility has an option to check & verify permissions.

> and then restart the installer. This time it gets a little bit further
> but stops with an error message saying that there are insufficient
> rights and asking me to put my admin password and try again.

If you installed to LO to /Applications, and that is restricted, then
this is the expected behaviour. I.e. if you had to authenticate when
installing LibreOffice itself, you'll also be ask for authentication
when installing the languagepack.

> So it looks like the installer script attempts to use mdfind and this is
> only available to the admin account on Tiger PPC.

No, that's just wrong. mdfind is available for everyone, for all
accounts and doesn't need any special privileges.

> In fact mdfind is only
> available to admin on OSX 10.6.7 as well, but in that case, why doesn't
> the script baulk on Intel as well ?

Because people don't manually mess with permissions on their system.

This problem has nothing to do with PPC, nor with Mac OS X Tiger.

The languagepack doesn't handle the case where a system component is
not available for use. But that's about it. The question is whether it
is worth to workaround this just because one user has a problem with
it....

If you mess around with your system, and thus the script-driven
installation doesn't work - just unpack the tarball manually. The
installation doesn't do anything else. You opened the script already,
so you see for yourself that there is no other magic.

* The script uses mdfind to locate an installed version of LO (once
you run it the first time, it will be registered, if you immediately
install the langpack after having installed LO, it might not yet be
found, for this case there is an option to specify the location
yourself).
* It checks whether the found location is really LibreOffice and then
* extracts the tarball with the languagepack data in the
LibreOffice.app folder (if necessary, asks for admin-authentication)

ciao
Christian