Congratulations on a major OSS project.   However...

In my role as the primary OSS focal for Boeing, I build hundreds of OSS
packages from source, on a lot of platforms.  For example I built
OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 from source tarball on Linux.   So I thought I was
ready for buiilding  2.0.4 on Linux.   Nope, it now requires something
called unowinreg.dll.  It won't even configure without that.  This is a
pretty major change for a bump release (2.0.3 to 2.0.4).   And it
doesn't make a Linux guy happy to be forced to use a ".dll" which
apparently has something to do with the MS Windows Registry.

1. Yes, you provided a prebuilt at:
http://tools.openoffice.org/unowinreg_prebuild/680/
However, we are authorized to build from source, not to use random
binaries drifting in from the internet.

2. The configure helpfully suggests pointing to the mingw compiler.
That in turn suposses I a) want, b) can find source for,  and c) can
build a Linux-based mingw compiler.

3. I thought it might be a mistake in the configure, so I read that
file.   I see you really mean it -- you explicitly require the dll for
non-Windows systems.

4. I thought perhaps I could bypass it by changing configure flags.
Nope.  Per find...grep I see it is used in ODK.   Doing "--without-odk"
breaks lots of other things.

5. Then I thought I'd hack configure to bypass the check (or maybe do a
"touch unowinreg.dll") and then hack the code to eliminate its use.
Looking at the find...grep, I see this is used in Java code.    Now, as
a Linux-based Pythoninsta, I'm just not going to spend my time trying to
decypher java code having to do with MS Windows Registries.   Life is
too short.

6. So finally I thought I'd ask you guys.   This is a showstopper for
future use of OpenOffice in my world.   Is there anything I can do to
help (besides the classic "send us a patch")?

Harry George   [EMAIL PROTECTED] 425-294-4718 
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