Configure fail on OS X 10.9 - Cannot create Makefile - Claims Ant too old and doesn't work

[Tor Lillqvist]

(Adding the developer list back. When responding to a message from the
mailing list, please respond to the list, too. The point of having a
public mailing list is that the complete discussions are public to
benefit others.)

> No, I don't have fink or macport or anything else similar installed.

OK, good.

> The Java situation now is go and grab the latest binary from Oracle, Apple stopped rolling its own.

Yes, I know, and that is complicated enough that I really don't like
having to enforce that on potential new developers who might not be
the least interested in Java. Ideally we would want LibreOffice to be
buildable without any 3rd-party software that has to be separately
installed.

Half-jokingly, I would say that typically there are two kinds of new
developers who run into trouble when attempting to build LibreOffice
the first time on OS X: 1) those who know too little and get confused
by some trivial hickup, and 2) those who know too much and have "too
new" or otherwise non-standard tools installed that the build
mechanism doesn't expect and get confused by.

> Without Java can I still run LibreOffice?

Sure. You will miss the built-in HSQLDB in Base and some other less
important functionality, I don't remember exactly. (Of course it is a
matter of opinion whether some functionality is important or not...
but for what I think is the core functionality, "normal" Writer, Calc
and Impress use, it shouldn't hurt if you don't have the Java bits
enabled.)

> PS: I have experience in C and OpenMP. Is there any part of LO where I can immediately put my experience in them to work?

Our code is C++ (and not necessarily very cleanly designed and written
C++, although that is of course a matter of opinion). There are only a
handful of files in C. We don't use OpenMP, and I thought Clang
doesn't support OpenMP?

To get something to work on, have a look at our Easy Hacks, which is a
set of hopefully easy tasks that beginners can work on to get to know
the codebase.

--tml