Do we really need LibreOffice installed by default?

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 09/19/2014 07:50 AM, drago01 wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Caolán McNamara  wrote:
>>> Because we could probably get rid of those requires if we need to. We
>>> removed and converted a lot of stuff away from java since the time the
>>> original requires were added, though it is convenient from the
>>> perspective of supporting manually added extensions to know that java is
>>> installed. I guess we're already compromised in the sense that we now
>>> only know for sure that at least the headless variant is installed.
>>
>> Yes, I think dropping the requires is a useful thing.  A release note must
>> be added as a warning for users installing third party extensions that may
>> still rely on Java
>
> Well when someone installs a third party extension and have no java
> would libreoffice tell him to install java?

It depends.  Typically, extensions would install just fine without any 
notice (old extensions using active registration could instead cause a 
rather cryptic error message and just not install at all).  They would 
only complain once their functionality is actually used.  Depending on 
how that functionality would be triggered, they'd either pop up a nice 
dialog stating that no JRE is available, or e.g. in the -- probably 
common -- case of triggering such functionality via a menu entry would 
just silently do nothing at all.  (And with the recent move to a 
java-headless--only dependency, extensions bringing along their own 
Java-drawn GUI will fail as badly or as gracefully as they handle a 
ClassNotFoundError.)

So, it's rather the "just fail without any obvious reason" case for now, 
I'd say.

> If not things will just fail without an obvious reason making our
> product looks bad. So I disagree on it being a useful thing. We don't
> have to save every single megabyte no matter what.
> And no a release notes entry is not enough.

Stephan