[Slackbuilds-users] openjdk was: Re: Updates - 20170225.1

[B Watson]

On 2/25/17, Christoph Willing <chris.willing at iinet.net.au> wrote:

> Apart from the complication of downloading the Oracle jdk, building it
> (repackaging it) seems simpler, not to mention much faster.
>
> Any other views on using openjdk* instead of jdk as requirement for
> LibreOffice?

I haven't really got a horse in this race (have never used LibreOffice),
but I'm full of ideas. Which you can ignore, if you think they're bad
ideas (I won't be offended).

What's needed is a way to say "either-or" in REQUIRES. Which isn't
likely to happen (nobody wants the added complexity, for good & valid
reasons). So instead...

You could leave both jdk and openjdk out of REQUIRES, and in the README
say "For a full-featured LibreOffice build, you will require either jdk
or openjdk8". For bonus points, have the script auto-detect which is
installed and use that. If neither is installed, act as though JAVA=no
was set.

Is it even possible to install both jdk and openjdk8 without them
stepping on each other? If so, the user should be able to set JAVA=jdk
or JAVA=openjdk8, and if he doesn't, and both are installed, I guess
give precedence to jdk.

For more bonus points, make the slack-desc say:

This package was built with %JAVA%.

...and instead of "cat $CWD/slack-desc > $PKG/install/slack-desc", do this:

sed "s,%JAVA%,$JAVA," $CWD/slack-desc > $PKG/install/slack-desc

Where JAVA is set to one of "jdk", "openjdk8", or "no Java support". I
do this in quite a few of my own builds, if only to help myself keep
track of what options a package was built with.

Whether this is actually a good idea depends on exactly what functionality
is missing from LibreOffice if it's built without Java. I have no idea,
but not having one or the other in REQUIRES is going to lead to a lot
of non-README-reading users building without it.

Another facet: some people will prefer openjdk because of
licensing. People who care about the "Libre" in the LibreOffice name
might care about this.