Build light weight conversion binary

[Michael Stahl]

On 20/07/12 17:25, Michael Meeks wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-07-19 at 22:26 -0700, Jerry Tan wrote:
>> The company that I work for use LibreOffice as the main word
>> processor. We convert a lot of client letters from doc/docx to open
>> document format.

>> - It won't work if there is already a LibreOffice instance running
> 
> 	That should be easy enough to fix; it's a matter of not checking the
> OSL_PIPE that we setup to send arguments to the main process. It is
> possible that --nolockcheck does that, or perhaps there is a hidden
> argument for that.

there is no need to fix anything, just set up a separate user profile
directory for your batch conversions and start soffice like this:

 soffice -env:UserInstallation=file:///tmp/lo_userdir_conversions


>> So my boss asked me to fix these 2 issues. I managed to build the
>> source code on Mac OS X Lion and then try to see what's going on
>> (unfortunately specifying --headless fail to build).

do you mean the configure "--enable-headless" option?  that is very
experimental and know to build only on the system of the guy who added it :)

> 	So - --headless doesn't work well for Mac, there is a need for some
> work there to fix it. There are really two different approaches - one is
> to re-factor the font code so it is re-usable without setting up the
> display / head logic, the other is to build & use freetype on mac, and
> re-use the Linux code for font rendering etc.

yes the --headless option in soffice, which currently works only on X11,
could in theory be made to work on Mac as well (and is _completely_
independent of the configure --enable-headless option).

>> - build a bare minimum/small binary (without too many dependencies)
>> just for conversion to odt? also how do I link statically?
>>   The conversion utility doesn't need all the gui libraries I believe.
>> Minimum dependency will make start up a lot quicker.
> 
> 	So - those fragmented libraries help you there - the UI pieces
> shouldn't be linked on startup.

indeed that's why there are various *ui libraries, they contain dialogs
that aren't loaded when you just convert documents.

>> - what to do to allow conversion working while there is an instance of
>> LibreOffice already running? Should I modify something in the source
>> code?

that's completely unnecessary, as i wrote above.

you can't start 2 soffice with the same user profile, and trying to make
that work is probably quite a large effort and would probably slow down
things with file locking and such if it can be made to work at all.