examples to manage docs using LibreOffice as a major component

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Nicholas,

On Tue, 2014-09-30 at 13:43 -0400, nicholas ferguson wrote:
> >> you will need to solve a truck-load of bootstrapping issues 
>
> Wow.  So in the past seven years, not a single successful attempt

	There are several successful attempts. It is certainly not impossible
to do this. Those attempts have however been done by people skilled and
experienced in the art of wrestling the LibreOffice octopus - I've
personally broken the back of a couple of them. My concern here is not
feasibility in the abstract, only the danger of yet more noisy and
time-consuming remote debugging by mailing-list to no useful purpose -
ie. ending up with something that is not contributed back.

>  at transforming a unit test.. and spinning it off into a separate
> executable...a unit test like filters_test.cxx

	Sure - those unit tests run under cppunittester - a separate
executable; as you can see if you read the make output and/or read the
Makefiles ;-) Separately, if you use LibreOfficeKit (under Linux) you
can write your own separate executable (eg. gtktiledviewer) really
extremely easily - though you are limited by the currently exposed API
there; failing that you can link the code into an Android or iOS binary
for yet another incarnation. All of it is do-able (with some hard work).

> Hard to believe....  These unit tests have so much functionality
> exposed... some hacker would seem to be naturally attracted to
> transform them into an independent executable.

	They are already executed as shared libraries loaded into a separate
executable post compilation. That however happens inside the warm,
nurturing, and rather painfully constructed context of a live
LibreOffice build tree.

	But of course - as with -any- community / code problem - you are by far
more than welcome to contribute to fixing the situation and meeting your
own need. Indeed, I encourage you to get stuck into fixing whatever
perceived gaps there are, all of us are responsible for improving things
here as their means allow :-) I look forward to your patches.

	ATB,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at collabora.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot