Building OpenOffice with GCJ?

Building OpenOffice with GCJ?

[Gerald Pfeifer]

RMS asked about the following:

  I've heard that OpenOffice includes Java programs that cannot be
  built with GCJ.  This has the consequence that a free GNU/Linux
  system including OpenOffice is not self-hosting.

Do you know what's the actual situation here?  If the above is indeed
the case, I understood he'd like talking to someone who is interested in
investigating the details of what needs to be done to allow OpenOffice
being built with GCJ.

Gerald

Re: Building OpenOffice with GCJ?

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 10:46:31AM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> RMS asked about the following:
> 
>   I've heard that OpenOffice includes Java programs that cannot be
>   built with GCJ.  This has the consequence that a free GNU/Linux
>   system including OpenOffice is not self-hosting.
> 
> Do you know what's the actual situation here?  If the above is indeed
> the case, I understood he'd like talking to someone who is interested in
> investigating the details of what needs to be done to allow OpenOffice
> being built with GCJ.

Java is used AFAIK for 2 things in OOo (it may have changed since I last
looked at it, which is more than a year ago): during the build process for XML
parsing and to build classes and Java UNO bridge so that one can use Java
plugins in OOo.
There is a whole lot of proprietary closed source classes packed in OOo.
When I was trying to build the XML parser using GCJ, I was unsuccessful,
so what we ended up doing is writing a different XML parser (basically very
short script using xsltproc) which does the same as the one written in Java
included in OOo and disabling Java plugin support in OOo (both because there
are no sources for lots of classes used by the plugins and because the
bridge relies on Sun JDK internals).
gcj is used only to cheat (ie. for each .java source it builds a dummy
.class which provides an empty class) to avoid massive makefile surgery.

	Jakub

Re: Building OpenOffice with GCJ?

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Jakub" == Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com> writes:

Jakub> There is a whole lot of proprietary closed source classes
Jakub> packed in OOo.

Jakub> When I was trying to build the XML parser using GCJ, I was
Jakub> unsuccessful, so what we ended up doing is writing a different
Jakub> XML parser

This part we can probably fix, one way or another.  You might have run
into the known XML problem, namely that libgcj includes one version of
the XML code and you can't link in two versions of the same class.
There's a workaround in place for this in 3.3 -- the XML code was
moved to a separate library.  (If it wasn't that, but was some other
problem, we'd like to know...)

There's not much we can do about code that relies on Sun internals,
though.  If RMS has someone who is interested in looking into this, it
sounds like they should start by rewriting those parts of OOo.

Tom

RE: Building OpenOffice with GCJ?

[S. Bosscher]

Funny, this was discussed in Debian Weekly News not so long ago
(googling, gotcha, December 17th, 2002):

"Why OpenOffice.org is not in Main? (...snip...) Steve Langasek
explained that the package currently depends on specific non-free
Java implementations, but Guido Guenther [29]mentioned that Red Hat
builds OpenOffice.org with gjc only."
 
Greetz
Steven


-----Original Message-----
From: Gerald Pfeifer
To: java@gcc.gnu.org
Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org
Sent: 31-3-03 10:46
Subject: Building OpenOffice with GCJ?

RMS asked about the following:

  I've heard that OpenOffice includes Java programs that cannot be
  built with GCJ.  This has the consequence that a free GNU/Linux
  system including OpenOffice is not self-hosting.

Do you know what's the actual situation here?  If the above is indeed
the case, I understood he'd like talking to someone who is interested in
investigating the details of what needs to be done to allow OpenOffice
being built with GCJ.

Gerald