[Libreoffice] Extension dependencies

[Christophe Strobbe]

Hi Stephan,

Thanks for the additional guidance.

At 15:48 15-11-2011, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
>On 11/15/2011 01:39 PM, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
>>At 09:59 4-11-2011, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
>>>Each .oxt extension can carry any number of dependencies, specifying
>>>conditions that need to be met by the hosting LO installation for the
>>>extension to be successfully deployable (see
>>><http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/Extensions/Dependencies>).
>>
>>This page links to <http://openoffice.org/extensions/description/2006>,
>>which returns an ERROR 404, so even if an extension developer wanted to
>>document more detailed dependencies, they would not know what syntax or
>>elements to use in their description.xml file.
>
>"http://openoffice.org/extensions/description/2006" is only used as 
>an XML namespace name on that page.  URLs used as XML namespace 
>names are not generally expected to be dereferencable (and are often 
>not).  (That the wiki software used for that page displays that 
>string as a browsable link appears to be an unfortunate mis-feature.)

Ah, yes. I was hoping to find some information on the "Others" item 
in the list of child elements at 
<http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/Extensions/Description_of_XML_Elements#Element_.2Fdescription.2Fdependencies>. 
My hope got the better of my XML knowledge :-(


>The general syntax for dependencies within description.xml is 
>described on that page, in the second-last paragraph (that also 
>contains the mis-links).  For the description of individual 
>dependencies, follow the link to 
><http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/Extensions/Description_of_XML_Elements#Element_.2Fdescription.2Fdependencies> 
>labelled "XML description for description.xml" in the "See also" 
>section at the bottom of the page.  (And for the description of 
>individual dependencies relative to LO instead of OOo, 
><https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Extension_Development> 
>is the new starting point.)
>
>>I was confronted with this problem just today because a new Java-based
>>extension cannot be installed on some Ubuntu systems even though it
>>installs without problems on Windows and some other Ubuntu systems.
>>The extension manager displayed the following error dialog:
>>(...)
>>It turns out that this issue can be solved with
>>sudo apt-get install libreoffice-java-common
>>
>>So I thought about how to document that dependency in description.xml,
>>but I couldn't ... (And libreoffice-java-common or
>>openoffice.org-java-common may be rather broad.)
>
>Yes, extension dependencies are currently only able to express 
>dependencies on a complete LO installation.  Dependencies that are 
>not fulfilled because only a subset of LO functionality is installed 
>are not supported.  (And note that what those available subsets are 
>is typically also specific to each LO distribution, even if the 
>optional module structure in scp2 sets some common ground.)

OK. I have put a warning about "sudo apt-get install 
libreoffice-java-common" on the extension's download page.
The error caused by the missing dependency was fairly serious; it 
caused my Ubuntu-inside-VirtualBox installation to completely freeze 
in some cases.

Best regards,

Christophe


-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
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