Various MacOS extension issues.

adomasven adomas.ven at gmail.com
Thu Feb 23 11:17:37 UTC 2017


I am a developer at Zotero: one of the leading reference management
softwares. I've recently taken over the development of word integration
plugins, including one for LibreOffice/OpenOffice. The code was handed over
to me as-is, it is a Java based extension and I have been trying to resolve
a couple of issues while figuring out how it works, but have been running
into LibreOffice bugs on every corner. It appears that MacOS is neglected by
LO, so I am trying to bring attention to the biggest issues:

1. Extension installing by double-clicking .oxt files has been broken for
nearly a year. This bug is still present on 5.3.0.3 and Mac OS Sierra
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99784

2. There are no decent ways to do debug logging on MacOS; none of the
commandline options are available
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugReport/Debug_Information#Mac_OSX:_How_to_get_debug_information

3. Since MacOS X El Capitan LibreOffice won't detect Oracle JREs and only
works with JDK. We have instructions for MacOS users in Zotero
documentation. I cannot find any bugs on the bugtracker
https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#libreoffice_5_on_macos_1011no_response_from_plugin

4. Since MacOS Sierra LibreOffice is generally very slow. We have been
getting reports of people having issues after performing a couple of actions
with our extension, but there have been no changes on our end since 2015.
Moreover, it seems that LibreOffice itself is terribly slow -- on my 2014
MacBook Pro it takes some good 5 seconds to open Character..., Paragraph...
or Bullets and Numbering... dialogs. On a 2016 linux machine with similar
specs it's essentially instantaneous. There are some reports of this
slowness online, but no bugs on the bugtracker that I could find.
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/79342/libreoffice-extremely-slow-in-mac-os-sierra/
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/77793/libreoffice-hangs-on-macos-sierra/

5. Trying to launch an Xdebug server with Java JDK 1.8.0_121 to debug a Java
extension throws an error "LibreOffice requires a Java runtime environment
(JRE) to perform this task. The selected JRE is defective. Please select
another version or install a new JRE and select it under LibreOffice -
Preferences - LibreOffice - Advanced." I've followed these instructions
https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Start_Parameters

6. I'm running into a specific problem where
XMessageBoxFactory#createMessageBox() won't display a dialog (the main
window goes inactive and you have to press Esc/Enter, so the dialog box is
created, but not visible on MacOS), but I don't have a small test-case yet.
Possible it is our code. I was hoping to debug it with Eclipse + Java Xdebug
server, but (5) rendered that impossible.

We want to provide a good experience for Zotero + LibreOffice users on
MacOS, but with the current state of LO it is proving difficult. I am
willing to create bugs on the bugtracker and provide debug information (if
somebody can point me in the direction of getting said debug info on MacOS),
but since the extension installation bug hasn't been solved for so long I am
not feeling very positive about whether there is going to be any movement
with any of these either. What is the current state of MacOS LO development
and is it possible to get some love for the MacOS version?

Thanks,
Adomas



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