Re: plans around openoffice-4 and -devel?

 
Van: Don Lewis <truckman@FreeBSD.org>
Datum: dinsdag, 14 juli 2026 08:16
Aan: Ronald Klop <ronald-lists@klop.ws>
CC: office@FreeBSD.org
Onderwerp: Re: plans around openoffice-4 and -devel?
> 
> On 10 Jul, Ronald Klop wrote:
> > Hi maintainers of the openoffice port,
> >
> > We have openoffice in our ports tree.
> > It uses Java, but in its current form it can only compile with openjdk8.
> > OpenOffice also uses a couple of Java libraries that are on
> > unsupported upstream versions. I just added a
> > apache-commons-httpclient CVE to our VUXML database that was already
> > discovered in 2012. The only user of this port in our ports tree is
> > openoffice.
> >
> > So... I'm wondering what the plans are with openoffice. Will it get a
> > leap into the modern world of Java? Can you compile it without Java
> > support?
> 
> The upstream trunk branch was just patched to use modern Java.  It should
> be easy to merge this into the branch for 4.2.X, which we snapshot and
> package as -devel.  This change will probably not make it into 4.1.X.
> 
> I don't think it is possible to build without Java, or at least not
> without losing major functionality.  I'll look into building without
> apache-commons-httpclient.
>  
> > NB: I'm not a user of openoffice. But I'm looking into cleaning up the
> > ports tree of old Java ports. NB2: I looked into
> > https://repology.org/project/openoffice/versions and noticed that not
> > a lot of the major pkg repositories (like Debian or Ubuntu) ship
> > openoffice anymore. But that is not really my concern.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Ronald.
> >  
> 
> 
> 


Hi Don,

Thanks for reaching out. And nice that you are willing to look into this.
By chance I also browsed the recent commits of openoffice yesterday and noticed the Java support changes.

Next to apache-commons-httpclient, openoffice also uses textproc/lucene. We have Lucene 3.6.2 in ports. This was released in 2013 and Lucene is now at 10.5. We only have this old version in ports for openoffice. Would you know a solution to free the textproc/lucene port? Maybe it is possible to not use --with-system-lucene and use an embedded Lucene? Or maybe some other solution?
Although this lucene thing is less of a concern to me as it doesn't have known CVEs and compiles fine with jdk25. But it is nice to move towards modern ports instead of museum ports. 😂

Regards,
Ronald.