OpenOffice.org and Java in Fedora

Dan Williams dcbw at redhat.com
Tue Nov 18 21:14:39 UTC 2003


Hi,

After some thought and discussion, I've come to the following
conclusion:

Since Fedora does not include Java for licensing reasons, all Red
Hat-built OpenOffice.org RPMs for Fedora will NOT include Java support,
and will NOT be built with Java enabled.  It's not good form to supply
an RPM that cannot be built on the platform it is intended for. 
Therefore, when you install Fedora and OOo, anything that requires Java
will not function.

However, I will attempt to keep a "Java-enable" switch in the specfile
that will allow Java-enabled building on Fedora, provided you have a
JRE/JDK installed.  I will attempt to keep Java-enabled building
up-to-date and functional.

In the future, I hope OOo will compile using gcj or other free Java
environments.  This is something we'll be working towards, and other
shave this same goal in mind (Debian).  When gcj is able to compile the
Java bits of OOo, the Fedora RPMs will include those patches.  Its going
to mean some work though.

So in summary, I'm not going to build Java-enabled RPMs of OOo for the
time being.  But if you'd like them, I'm happy to keep it possible (and
will try to keep it building out-of-the-box with a specfile switch).  If
anyone would like to help out in getting OOo to work with gcj or other
free Java environments, by all means contact me and I'll try to point
you in the right direction.

Cheers,
Dan





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