How many degrees of headlessness do we need?

[Jens Tröger]

Hi,

Thank you Tor for starting this discussion; very interesting and
necessary.  I've been confused about these different modes for a while,
in particular because I run on both Mac and Linux where the same switch
works differently.

I use LO for document analysis (not conversion), i.e. I need to load a
document and poke its styles and also extract some content.  This
*should* run without any GUI because we don't even have the X libs
installed on Linux; works ok so far.  That exact same approach on Mac
*always* pops open a window, which has irritated me for a while.  Good
you mention that this might be broken.

Another question that arose from these switches is the "server mode" in
general.  I mean, when I run LO headless with a named pipe or socket
port, then it becomes a server.  However, it seems to scale poorly, and
your mention of dialog/error boxes trying to disrupt the use makes me
nervous.

  https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=74002

I was unable to find good documentation regarding headless mode, server
mode, and interacting with LO in such an environment.  Perhaps, to bring
order into these various switches, it'll help to define use cases and
use scenarios; then adjust and fix the switches accordingly.

Cheers,
Jens

-- 
Jens Tröger
http://savage.light-speed.de/