On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 03:36:27PM -0700, Paul Rogers wrote:
> > It doesn't need any of the extras (dictionaries, help, translations).
> 
> "Need", perhaps not, but would you say they are generally useful?  I see
> they're in the 7.7 book.
> 
> I get the impression the help extra's main purpose is to convert the
> help files into wiki format.  I'm thinking that might be nice on a
> multi-
> user system, emphasis on "multi", but not something I'd especially want
> if that's ALL it did.
> 
I assumed the help tarball *provides* the help files.  No idea about
a wiki version of them - to be honest, if you can spare time and
space to install a conventional distro somewhere, even though you'll
hate it (you are an LFS user, after all) with LO it might help you
decide if there is any benefit.

Not everybody who builds LFS and BLFS, even only for themself, is
comfortable with English (we had a pt_BR question on lfs-support this
week).  I've never found computer dictionaries for English useful (too
many false errors: if I write a letter including my address, the town
where I live is flagged up as an error), but on the rare occasions I
try to write a letter in another language, a dictionary is sometimes
useful.

On some of my machines I build a lot of languages/dictionaries in LO,
(I keep hoping I will manage to get away one day) just in case : but
one of those boxes has now died - on the test machine I now only build
en_GB, on another I put most of the available European languages (not
Valencian Catalan, there is no locale for that unless you use a
patched (ubuntu) glibc), and on my languages/fonts machine (emphasis
on fonts!) I add many Asian languages, as well as extra TTF/OTF fonts.
I remember that some tool to do with the (old) han ideograms in korean
(hanja) was only built if I enabled the korean language : it looked as
if it might have been useful when I was exploring korean fonts -
just looking for text to paste and then see how different fonts
looked - but in practice all the modern text I could find only used
the specifically-korean glyphs (hangul).

For somebody in the USA, unless you write in Spanish, if you have to
ask the question then other languages, translations, dictionaries are
probably not useful.

> > ​As of 6/23/2015 11:20PM EDT
Ooh!  A zero-width space! [U+200b].  Kewl ;-)

> >
> > Last v4 series:  4.4.4.2
> > Current:  5.0.0.1
> > Current BLFS development:   4.4.3.2
> 
> There's no feature I know I want from the 4-series.  I did check to see
> if the 3-series had some significant CVEs, the other main reason for
> using the "latest & greatest".  3-series will do, I think.
> 

ISTR that the build system has been improved - out with the old
system derived from Star Office, in with gnu make.  But to be honest
I don't think it made a lot of difference.  For many people, general
bugfixes are probably more important.  I also recall that I had a
problem with one spreadsheet on a 3.6 system after I had moved to
one of the 4.x series, but I no longer recall the detail - and when
I reinstated an old 7.2 box after its replacement died, I could not
see any problem - but it might have only been a problem on a
spreadsheet where I balance my accounts - some of my other
spreadsheets are just grids with dates and text.

> >> raptor needs cURL?
> > Doesn't seem to requre it. But it uses it for retriving files
> > from www.
> 
> I grepped libcurl and saw a line that said "if libcurl is available", so
> I have the same impression.  I had to check RDF on Wikipedia because
> neither redland nor its upstream libraries told me anything about what
> it's FOR.  I think I'll try leaving it out--the more things using the
> internet the larger my "attack surface".  (One of my gripes with KDE is:
> a file manager should not be a browser!)
> 

If only it would *work* as a browser! (recent kde4, now that I have
enough CPU power - window images generally move about if I'm not
extremely careful trying to move to a different desktop, but the big
problems are in konqueror: black-on-black input boxes, and crashing
on e.g. /. - I have no use for file managers).

> > According to the page, cURL can be used for more than just retrieving
> > files from the www. It can do file access from most protocols or
> > prefixes. Raptor may need cURL for this purpose. I have never looked
> > at the source code, so I cannot be 100% sure, but it I think that is
> > probably what Raptor uses it for.
> 
> I'm not sure why though.  According to what I read about RDFs, they're a
> primitive sort of relational database of subject-property-value
> "triples" for managing information.  Now, maybe one of the values is a
> URL reference, but still, I think it's probably more secure to let the
> higher-level browser or whatever deal with it if necessary.
> 

I've no idea, and trying to deal with texlive and perl modules takes
most of my time.  If anybody ever looks deeply  into this, it would
be nice to know - but in the meantime I'll probably spend any
relaxation time looking at languages or history on wikipedia ;)

> > cURL is pretty much the de facto standard when working with
> > unstructured data.
> 
> I dunno.  If none of you scream "STOP!", and it turns out I'm making a
> mistake, maybe I'll have to rebuild.  It's happened before.  ;-)
> 
> Thanks guys.  I think I have a plan (for now).
It's only an office suite, and I don't think it offers the attack
surface that mickeysoft has always offered, so I guess you should
follow your own inclination - unless somebody who knows better
speaks up.

At least you will probably build it quicker than I do (6hr30m on my
test machine with -j4 on x86_64 gcc5, current LO version - that is
the box only building en_GB, the others are "somewhat slower" ;-)

I hope you find that building it is worthwhile.

ĸen
-- 
Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady.
Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m.
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