About everyone who ever built OpenOffice in the last couple of years
wondered why an almost complete (and obsolete/unmaintained/ancient)
version of Mozilla Seamonkey was needed when building OpenOffice with
its security features enabled such as support for password protected
documents.
The branch "Remove_MOZ" shows that it is possible to get rid of that
dependency and I suggest we do that as soon as possible. The branch was
inappropriately named because it is only about the removing the mozilla
dependency of security related stuff.
But the old Seamonkey binaries still have another purpose: for now they
are needed for providing its own address books that used to be in the
"Mork" format. It also provides access to some address books [1] such as
LDAP, Outlook and Outlook Express.
[1]
http://www.openoffice.org/dba/specifications/address_book_architecture.html
Other address sources such as JDBC, ODBC, CSV-Text, MySql and dBase
already work without Mozilla. On Mac the native Address Book is already
supported directly.
Since issue 91209 the mozilla address books were disabled on Mac
altogether anyway, so on Mac we could rid AOO of its heavy Seamonkey
dependency really soon without removing any features by using NSS
instead of bundling a large set of Seamonkey libraries.
On the other platforms a very high percentage of our user base wouldn't
notice any missing features if the Mozilla address book support was
removed there too.
Developing mozilla-less replacements should be possible and this would
remove a lot of complexity. As a first idea the replacements could be
implemented as extensions using something like [2] for LDAP, [3] for
Mork and [4] for WAB if there was an UNO API to facility that support.
Comparing the complexity of the scripts below vs the complexities and
maintenance headaches the ancient Seamonkey and its XPCOM<->UNO bridge
is like comparing the weight of mice to elephants...
[2] http://www.python-ldap.org/
[3]
https://bug241438.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=175024&action=view
[4]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11538550/retrieving-outlook-contacts-via-python
But splitting off the security dependency is much more important. I plan
to integrate the changes needed for that soon. They will be enabled
either with
--enable-nss-module
or with the more general option
--enable-category-b
For the mozilla address books I plan to add the option
--enable-mozab-module
to replace the then way too broadly named option
--enable-mozilla
Until the replacements outlined above have been developed this new
option will allow bundling of the old Seamonkey binaries for users that
depend on its address book support.
Herbert
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