Re: [Libreoffice] Extension dependencies

Hi Stephan,

Thanks for the additional guidance.

At 15:48 15-11-2011, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> On 11/15/2011 01:39 PM, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
> > At 09:59 4-11-2011, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> > > Each .oxt extension can carry any number of dependencies, specifying
> > > conditions that need to be met by the hosting LO installation for the
> > > extension to be successfully deployable (see
> > > <http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/Extensions/Dependencies>).
> >
> > This page links to <http://openoffice.org/extensions/description/2006>,
> > which returns an ERROR 404, so even if an extension developer wanted to
> > document more detailed dependencies, they would not know what syntax or
> > elements to use in their description.xml file.
>
> "http://openoffice.org/extensions/description/2006"; is only used as 
> an XML namespace name on that page.  URLs used as XML namespace 
> names are not generally expected to be dereferencable (and are often 
> not).  (That the wiki software used for that page displays that 
> string as a browsable link appears to be an unfortunate mis-feature.)

Ah, yes. I was hoping to find some information on the "Others" item 
in the list of child elements at 
<http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/Extensions/Description_of_XML_Elements#Element_.2Fdescription.2Fdependencies>. 
My hope got the better of my XML knowledge :-(


> The general syntax for dependencies within description.xml is 
> described on that page, in the second-last paragraph (that also 
> contains the mis-links).  For the description of individual 
> dependencies, follow the link to 
> <http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/Extensions/Description_of_XML_Elements#Element_.2Fdescription.2Fdependencies> 
> labelled "XML description for description.xml" in the "See also" 
> section at the bottom of the page.  (And for the description of 
> individual dependencies relative to LO instead of OOo, 
> <https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Extension_Development> 
> is the new starting point.)
>
> > I was confronted with this problem just today because a new Java-based
> > extension cannot be installed on some Ubuntu systems even though it
> > installs without problems on Windows and some other Ubuntu systems.
> > The extension manager displayed the following error dialog:
> > (...)
> > It turns out that this issue can be solved with
> > sudo apt-get install libreoffice-java-common
> >
> > So I thought about how to document that dependency in description.xml,
> > but I couldn't ... (And libreoffice-java-common or
> > openoffice.org-java-common may be rather broad.)
>
> Yes, extension dependencies are currently only able to express 
> dependencies on a complete LO installation.  Dependencies that are 
> not fulfilled because only a subset of LO functionality is installed 
> are not supported.  (And note that what those available subsets are 
> is typically also specific to each LO distribution, even if the 
> optional module structure in scp2 sets some common ground.)

OK. I have put a warning about "sudo apt-get install 
libreoffice-java-common" on the extension's download page.
The error caused by the missing dependency was fairly serious; it 
caused my Ubuntu-inside-VirtualBox installation to completely freeze 
in some cases.

Best regards,

Christophe


--
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
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