Excessive dependancies for OpenOffice 2.0 port

[Mikhail T.]

=> Actually, I do realise that, and, in my opinion, it is _harder_
=> to keep it building the current way. The third-party packages --
=> installed by other ports -- have their own maintainers, who watch out
=> for build problems.

=Then I suggest that you provide the patches and feed them back to OOo
=so that the next time you don't have to do it again once a new OOo
=version comes up. Don't forget to sign the copyright agreement.

I am doing that, but I'm NOT an OOo developer. My patches tend to be
FreeBSD-specific. FYI, I too have some experience in porting and I am
well aware of the benefits of the vendor's accepting the patches.

"Feeding them back" to OOo is a good idea, but it should not be
holding back the progress of the FreeBSD port. And that is my point.
In "lawyers' speak", the goals of the OOo and the FreeBSD are similar,
but not identical. Maho has a "conflict of interest" -- and I feel the
FreeBSD port is under-represented.

And, obviously, I don't care for a "copyright agreement". The patches
are/will be there for all to see, and -- by virtue of being part of a
FreeBSD port, they will, of course, be BSD-licensed.

=> Building a special version of C compiler is, AFAIK, unprecedented.
=Feel free to work around the bugs that prohibit the use of *old* gcc

I do feel very free, thank you. But you are not really countering my
point here... Requiring a port-specific C-compiler is unprecedented. You
stated the problem, but the lang/ooo-gcc is NOT a solution to it.

=Even though you have your point that a lot of packages are included as old
=versions there is also work going on to reduce these dependencies. Did
=you ever look at the "--with-system-XXX" parameters of OOo's configure?

Yes, OF COURSE, I did "ever look". Very nice of OOo to finally wise up
to this (1.x releases had very little flexibility in this). Too bad,
FreeBSD port does not use this, even where it can.

=Also you complain about a tool (dmake) that takes roughly 10 seconds
=to build *and* that is available in the ports collection so that it
=doesn't have to be rebuild? Do you have the time to check/redo all the
=makefiles for a 300MB source package that builds just fine with dmake?

I don't have the time (to re-write makefiles into BSD or GNU make), but
I don't object to using dmake per se. I object to using the bundled one
instead of the devel/dmake.

=Maybe you should check your attitude. If you stop thinking of OOo as a
=port but as an application that runs on many OSs (including FreeBSD)
=and the failure to do so as a bug we might actually get somewhere.

I sure appreciate the OOo project and Maho's contribution to it.
But I am talking about a different thing called "FreeBSD port
editors/openoffice.org-2.0". Maho -- and, perhaps, yourself -- are OOo
developers (nothing wrong with that). I'd like a good FreeBSD port...

=I see that you are already familiar with the internals so that I don't
=have to point you to Jan Holesovskys (and others) work on the 64bit
=version.

Thanks, I'm aware of Kendy's work and have exchanged e-mails with him
already as well. Jan's work for the Debian port is an example, of what
is lacking in the FreeBSD port. He even has patches, that HE KNOWS will
never be accepted "upstream". Imagine that!

	-mi