Re: Building OpenOffice with GCJ?

[Jakub Jelinek <jakub at redhat dot com>]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 10:46:31AM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> RMS asked about the following:
> 
>   I've heard that OpenOffice includes Java programs that cannot be
>   built with GCJ.  This has the consequence that a free GNU/Linux
>   system including OpenOffice is not self-hosting.
> 
> Do you know what's the actual situation here?  If the above is indeed
> the case, I understood he'd like talking to someone who is interested in
> investigating the details of what needs to be done to allow OpenOffice
> being built with GCJ.

Java is used AFAIK for 2 things in OOo (it may have changed since I last
looked at it, which is more than a year ago): during the build process for XML
parsing and to build classes and Java UNO bridge so that one can use Java
plugins in OOo.
There is a whole lot of proprietary closed source classes packed in OOo.
When I was trying to build the XML parser using GCJ, I was unsuccessful,
so what we ended up doing is writing a different XML parser (basically very
short script using xsltproc) which does the same as the one written in Java
included in OOo and disabling Java plugin support in OOo (both because there
are no sources for lots of classes used by the plugins and because the
bridge relies on Sun JDK internals).
gcj is used only to cheat (ie. for each .java source it builds a dummy
.class which provides an empty class) to avoid massive makefile surgery.

	Jakub