Re: What is an adequate "existing LibreOffice installation" for extension development?

> > > On 10.01.20 18:09, David Johnson wrote:
> > > The environment I work in:
> > >
> > > Ubuntu 19.10
> > > LibreOffice 6.3.3.2
> > >
> > > The LibreOffice SDK requires a path to a LibreOffice installation:
> > >
> > > "*OFFICE_HOME*: Path to an existing LibreOffice installation, e.g. 
> > > "/opt/libreoffice8". Be sure that it is not a user installation only."
> > >
> > > My question: can I use the LibreOffice that is in the Ubuntu repository 
> > > for this purpose?
> > >
> > > In other words, will the following suffice:
> > >
> > > $ sudo apt-get install libreoffice
> > >
> > > and then I tried to find the installation directory, which seems to be:
> > >
> > > /usr/lib/libreoffice/
> >
> > yes and no.
> >
> > if you install the SDK from Ubuntu repository too then you have to use
> > the Ubuntu libreoffice package. i'm not sure what it's called; in Fedora
> > it's "libreoffice-sdk".
>
> Why is that so? (I pose this question just for improving my understanding of the whole process.) 
> If you manually download an SDK version (so from The Document Foundation (TDF) site) that is 
> compatible with the LibreOffice that is in the repository of a given Linux distribution, shouldn't 
> that also work?
>
> I did grep through the Ubuntu repositories and I found:
>
> libreoffice-dev - office productivity suite -- SDK -- architecture-dependent parts
>
> That looks quite promising.

In the meanwhile I have tried installing the libreoffice-dev package -- with success! It turns out 
doing this installed all the required libraries/headers needed. Now, the LibreOffice extension 
examples seem to compile successfully.

> > if you install the SDK from TDF upstream packages you have to install
> > LibreOffice from TDF upstream packages.
> >
> > > Is this adequate? Or is this "only a user installation"?
> >
> > i'm not sure what "user installation" refers to here, but possibly it is
> > the user configuration directory, cf. soffice -env:UserInstallation=...
>
> Thanks for the tip! Perhaps someone else can confirm this? If the semantics of "user installation" 
> is not clear to you, then it is definitely not clear to a humble beginner in LibreOffice extension 
> development (like me ;-( ).

I now also think I know what they mean with "user installation". In probably all  
Linuxdistributions, many applications have two variants, a normal variant and a "developer's" 
variant. In Ubuntu these carry the postfix "-dev". See:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1157192/what-do-the-dev-packages-in-the-linux-package-repositories-actually-contain

I think that https://api.libreoffice.org/docs/install.html uses the phrase "user installation" to 
refer to the non-developer variant of the application in the package repository. For an experienced 
Linux developer this may clear, but I think many people would be helped if this would be explained 
a bit more. (Something like: "Install the developer's package of LibreOffice that is present in the 
repository of your Linux distribution, or install LibreOffice manually from ... . Examples of 
developer's packages on several distro's are: Ubuntu: libreoffice-dev; Fedora: libreoffice-sdk, 
etc.")