[Libreoffice] de-emphasisig java ... - summary so far ...

What fun,

        It seems this is rather a polarising question, so of course it makes
sense to pause and think it through some more; here is my attempt to
summarise the major arguments & their stake-holders :-)

A. it makes LibreOffice easier to build, to not require Java
        + I made this point, Spaetz has some examples of build failure
          with different Javas / Ant (that speak of much frustration and
          wasted time), Jonathan has been bitten by junit issues,
          I (personally) have had -tons- of weirdo java build issues
          in the past, Lubos builds --without-java
                + Cloph points out that these are just bugs
                        + that installing a JDK is easy
                        + and it is easy to manually add misc. configure
                          options to work around them

B. it makes LibreOffice less reliable because developers do not use and
   test what the users are using, so don't see their bugs
        + Caolan makes this point well, supported by Norbert and Rene
        + Base would break without it, Wols wants to work on Base
        + Kevin agrees => Easy Hack for Base (been there for weeks)

C. including Java is bad anyway: Freedom, performance, power,
   non-re-distributability, download size, patent trolling etc.
        + KAMI, myself, Spaetz etc.

        Anyhow, so far it seems the consensus is that defaulting to
--without-java is a bad idea as of now :-) However - I would like to go
another round, and (re-)introduce some under-articulated thoughts:

        A. I believe it is un-arguable that by removing a large,
           complex, fragile, version confused dependency we do indeed
           make it easier to build.
                + Yes, failures are always bugs - but we cannot easily
                  control and manage other people's systems so they have
                  the right build deps.
                        + Once you have this setup right it is then
                          -very- easy to forget the problem exists until
                          you re-install your O/S
                        + Installing the (right) JDK is not easy - I
                          often get it wrong
                        + Broken builds hurt the newbies we need !
                + Ergo as a minimum I would like to make it possible to
                  detect some (any) badness in your Java environment:
                  missing ant, junit, jre, javac of wrong version, etc.
                  and simply automatically disable java. Also adding a
                  some configure failure warnings saying "try using
                   --without-java"

        B. Some huge proportion of our user-base is Windows users, some
           quarter of these will not have Java installed cf.
           http://riastats.com/
                + ie. it is possible that we have more Windows users
                  without Java, than Linux + Mac users together.
                + Live-CD users (at least we get OO.o on ours) and their
                  default install do not get the (big) Java beast, and
                  neither does their default install image.
           We cannot bundle the JRE (as Oracle do), and if the user goes
           to download it, they have OpenOffice.org advertised to them.

        D. So - I concur that it is bad that Base and other things
           break without Java, on the other hand, this is already a
           fact for lots of our users, and providing more developer
           focus on fixing it is perhaps not -such- a bad thing ? :-)
                + ie. no-one engaged with the "this will nudge
                  developers in the right direction" argument
                + the Easy Hack is still un-addressed here
                + indeed - we should have pleasant warnings about
                  the need for Java in the cases where this breaks
                  currently - right ?

        Were there some other big arguments I missed ? Oh, and thanks everyone
for keeping the tone friendly :-)

        Thanks,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot