Hi there,
it has been my understanding that the
<com.sun.star.comp.helper.Bootstrap> class and its bootstrap() method
are meant to allow bootstrapping OpenOffice in an easy manner/fashion on
any operating system.
As I have reported, on some Linux distributions that I have come to look
at, the bootstrapping using <com.sun.star.comp.helper.Bootstrap> does
not work! In the e-mails discussions in this group the reason was seen
in a directory structure that would not structured the way that OOo (the
helper class?) would expect it to be and hence would not be able to find
the necessary pieces to get OOo started up. As being able to start OOo
easily from the commandline *is* very important for many reasons it
would be therefore very important to be sure that the helper class (OOo
itself?) can successfully work on all distributions and succesfully
start-up from any configuration. Especially, if these distributions do
re-package OOo in a standardized way it seems, which has become state of
the art on those distributions!
---
In the meantime I was able to get in contact with Rene Engelhard, who
has been packaging OOo for Debian according to the documented OOo rules,
but in the process has been able to follow the standardized Linux
installation rules. This is (with his permission) what he wrote:
And this directory structure *IS* intact. we have <ooodir>/program where
all libs are and we have <oodir>/program/classes (which indeed get
changed, though as it's a symlink to a sane location following the
standard. But the path is changed in the OOo configuration, too to not
look in classes/ but in /usr/share/java/openoffice).
I even bit into the bullet and added /usr/bin/soffice which apparently is
needed for making the bootstrap thing work..
So it seems to me that Rene tried hard to create an OOo distribution
which adheres to both, the OOo and the Debian standards.
However, it seems too, that using <com.sun.star.comp.helper.Bootstrap>'s
bootstrap does not work, as it is not able to find soffice!
:-((
---
Being stuck right now, I would request some suggestions/help on how to
proceed from here in order to make sure that the helper class is truly
able to startup OOo on any OOo installation that adheres to the
installation rules (which seems to be the case with the Debian package).
It would be quite awkward, if the only resolution at hand would be to
advise people to rip off an OOo installation which adheres to its
platform standards, and install the single-tree'd version that can be
downloaded from OOo's home, as this would imply that in reality there
was no freedom to adapt the OOo installation tree according to the rules
of the host system.
Thankful for any ideas/hints/help!
---rony
