Quote:
Originally Posted by orbea
This is after several friendly requests, suggestions and examples on how it can be improved, mostly via e-mail. About 75% of these were outright ignored and users still stumble over these relatively silly things. Personally if I did this with any of my own scripts I would deserve the flack and I would hope someone would spend the time to explain this to me or people using my script.
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Users stumble because they didn't read the READMEs, not because his script was buggy. And suggesting things several times gets to be nagging. You've obviously spent a lot of time "explaining" this to him and he hasn't changed, so why continue to beat the dead horse?
Quote:
Originally Posted by orbea
I'm not sure what a full LibreOffice is supposed to be, is it a build where it uses largely default options from their configure script? In which case my script just does that if you ignore all the extra options and just run ./libreoffice.SlackBuild.
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It was in what I quoted, and I'll repeat it here: "fully functional LibreOffice, most optional features are included by default". I don't know LibreOffice well enough to determine what that "most" is categorized by, but looking at ./configure --help, the default is to build libreoffice with java, not without (which is what the SlackBuild script does, but offers an option to disable it).
Code:
--with-java=<java command>
Specify the name of the Java interpreter command.
Typically "java" which is the default. To build
without support for Java components, applets,
accessibility or the XML filters written in Java,
use --without-java or --with-java=no.
Quote:
Originally Posted by orbea
LibreOffice is a complex beast with lot of options, I'm not sure what your point is? I often try to expose interesting options in my own scripts at SBo.
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But are all 80+ of those options "interesting"? While many programs allow in-depth configuration like this, most maintainers don't offer it because it isn't worth it... both to them and the majority of the users using it. If a user really needs to disable a specific unlikely function of the program, they can edit the script and add or remove a ./configure option, but there usually isn't very many use cases where both a maintainer and user benefit from a mountain of passable options in a SlackBuild script.
Quote:
Originally Posted by orbea
Sometime in 2015 where the only choices for LibreOffice on Slackware was the binary repackage at SBo and Alien Bob's script and packages I realized that while neither is wrong, they just didn't fit my specific use case so I spent a lot of effort making my own script and then adding most of the many optional dependencies to SBo. I then offered my script, but it was rejected because SBo did not need more than one libreoffice script. I accepted this and moved on maintaining it in my own repo. Give or take several months later the LibreOffice (From source) script was added to SBo and without anyone ever asking if I was still interested. While that was kind of lame I was happy that someone else was doing it and offered friendly advice on how to do it better.
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It can be unfortunate when you request something on SBo and nobody takes you up on it and then someone else just submits it and theirs is accepted. I'm sure that's happened to more than just me and you. However, that's just the world. It doesn't give you permission to constantly berate that maintainers work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by orbea
Now around 3 years later it still suffers from many of the same problems it did back then and users still stumble on silly things like avahi or JDK. Not to mention all my effort maintaining the optional dependencies is still mostly wasted...
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This is where you are just
wrong and uninformed. The script that this post was created about is
libreoffice, which is the repackaged rpm. This does require both jdk (which you already stated above) and avahi (found on
this post). These two are required dependencies unless you're willing to let users run into errors because of missing dependencies. With this package being a simple repackaging, you're stuck with the dependencies from upstream.
On the compiled version, they are both optional, however, the maintainer for
LibreOffice (the compiled version) chose to make jdk required which is the default for libreoffice (however, he offers a flag to disable java support).
Quote:
Originally Posted by orbea
Edit: Also, its worth pointing out almost all other maintainers actually implement improvements from other people or even come up with something better. There would be nothing to complain about if these problems were just fixed instead of being dragged out like this...
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I've had maintainers implement some of my suggestions and reject others, but I left it at that. There's no reason to consistently try and call them out... especially in cases like this when the problems would be non-existent if people read the READMEs for the programs they intend to install.
Quote:
Originally Posted by orbea
LibreOffice upstream enables JDK by default and has avahi disabled, my own script disables JDK by default because I really am not interested in using or supporting java, but no offense to people who want that. The point remains, LibreOffice can be fully functional without it, much of the functionality has since been rewritten as python3.
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Let me clarify for you... the defaults for compiling are to enable JDK and disable avahi, but whoever provided the pre-compiled RPM used by Willy in his SlackBuild, both JDK and avahi are enabled (not sure if that is one of the LibreOffice developers or if they use 3rd-party packagers for that).
Willy can't make up magical dependency errors (same link as above, but it seems right to link it again).
In regards to the LibreOffice SlackBuild with JDK and avahi, it uses the same defaults as running ./configure, with JDK being enabled and avahi disabled. But you can disable JDK by passing
JAVA=no as documented in #5 of the README and it will pick up avahi automatically if it is installed.
Make sure you argue about the correct version of SBo script. avahi is *only* listed as an optional dependency on the compiled version, and it is picked up automatically if it is installed. It is listed as a required dependency for the pre-compiled version as it is built into the software.
Quote:
Originally Posted by orbea
I think people who just want a working libreoffice without the effort in compiling it should just use Alien Bob's packages, for Slackware its the best supported option with a reliable track record.
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For this, we both agree that Eric's is a great package to suggest to people.