OpenOffice extensions are widely employed to extend its core
functionality. Downloading and installing extensions is no problem for
experienced users, but for novice users the extra steps required could
appear as a gratuitous nuisance. So when creating install sets builders
can serve their target audience better by bundling popular extensions
such as galleries, templates, etc.
Some of these extensions are platform specific, some are language
specific, some should be integrated directly into the core package and
for some this would be not such a good idea.
So there are a lot of different use cases that need to be covered. It
was already possible to bundle extensions as pre-registered and unzipped
files by working in the scp2 module. This is not too convenient and due
to legal concerns it is not possible in general.
On this note I extended the spectrum of possibilities by providing a
configuration option named --with-bundled-extension-blobs. As the name
suggests it allows to bundle extensions exactly as the same blobs which
were approved for re-distribution. When OpenOffice is run they then get
installed automatically.
E.g. if there are some cute galleries that are interesting for some
audience you could bundle them by giving the configuration option
--with-bundled-extension-blobs="kitty-gallery.oxt puppy-gallery.oxt" and
providing the corresponding files in the ext_sources directory.
When the resulting package gets installed these files will be copied 1:1
into one of the programs shared directories from where they will be
automatically picked up. Without requiring the user to do any bothersome
steps they can then be directly used in OpenOffice.
I hope you find this useful,
Herbert
