Windows dev please evaluate my ProposedEasyHack

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 06:59:56PM +0100, Andras Timar wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 6:42 PM, Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel at mamane.lu> wrote:

>> evaluate https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56904
>> which is Windows-specific, so I don't really have a clue how to do
>> it and what it entails, but I expect it is rather easy if one
>> already knows one's way around msi (Windows Installer) files and
>> how we generate them.

>> Is it "easy" enough for EasyHack? Can you outline to the lucky
>> winner that will pick it up how to do it?

> IMHO hacking MSI is not easy by any means. It's probably easy only for
> an installer expert. I'd add the AccessDatabaseEngine.exe to a
> CustomAction and call this CustomAction in the install sequence. It
> may work. But why add a 25MB 3rd party package to LibreOffice, which
> will benefit a tiny fraction of users? We don't even bundle Java,
> which has a wider audience. I think it's enough to add a paragraph to
> help, with the link to this MS download page.

An iterative improvement would be to, on connection to an "Access 2007"
datasource:

1) Detect whether it is installed, by checking for availability of
   that specific ADO driver (not by checking Windows Installer for a
   specific ID!).

2) If not, have a popup that explains the situation and gives the
   link.

(I believe we have such a pop-up for Java, minus the download link.)

Why would we bundle it? Well, so that things work "out of the
box". Because contrary to Java, this "3rd party package" is a rather
obscure thing for users. Because since it was bundled with most
versions of Windows, users actually never were aware that LibreOffice
was using this third-party package under the hood.

Do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages? You have a point, that's
not clear, maybe even dubious.

-- 
Lionel