Bruce Byfield wrote: > I'm working on an article about the decision to use Java in > OpenOffice.org. The article will include both positive and negative > opinions, and talk about how it affects repackagers of OOo, and how they > are planning on handling the situation. > > If possible, I'd like to get a quote about how Debian plans to respond. > By putting together a Java-free package? By using a free implementation > of Java? By some other means? Since Debian is a distribution that is > more dedicated than most to free software, I'm especially eager to hear > how it is approaching the issue. > > And if anyone on the Debian OpenOffice Team would care to make other > comments, I'd appreciate hearing them, by all means.
Some additional information, as the person who originally did the work to make Java optional around version 1.1.0. OO.o uses Java heavily, and will unfortunately probably continue doing so. At the time, Java was thought to be optional, in that there was a compile-time option to disable it; however, since that support was never really used, it was broken in a number of places for quite some time due to new functionality that required Java and hadn't used the conditional. Fixing it was a matter of conditionalizing all the usage of Java functionality within the code, and changing the build system to use other non-Java tools for working with XML files. I personally don't mind that OO.o has support for Java plugins, and that that support is disabled if you don't build with Java. What's annoying is the addition of Java-based functionality to the core of OO.o, such that major pieces of functionality are unavailable without Java (and due to lack of testing, those pieces of functionality often break the non-Java build). Getting the OO.o 2.0 prereleases to build without Java is quite an endeavor; Chris Halls and others are working on that, and I don't know what the status of that work is, but I know that it is due to similar issues: unconditional use of Java functionality throughout OO.o. One key issue is that all we can generally do is conditionally disable things; actually *replacing* all the missing functionality with non-Java equivalents would be a full-time job. I don't think the OpenOffice.org developers are really intentionally trying to keep OO.o requiring Java; I think they just aren't particularly interested in the ability to run without it, and since they know Java well, they often turn on it for new developments. Developers have said before that they are not averse to making such functionality optional, just that they aren't likely to do that work themselves. In the ideal scenario, we could just keep Java entirely optional, such that you only need it if you want to script OO.o with Java, just as you only need Python if you want to script OO.o with Python. However, we may end up having to make the included Java functionality work with one of the Free JDKs instead, if that ends up being easier. - Josh Triplett
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