invention

OK, I now have OpenOffice.org building nice English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Northern Sotho builds on Linux. Remaining issues:

• The license and readme files aren't being handled correctly for the non-English builds
• Character encoding problems (which I thought were fixed ; perhaps the gsi files are old)
• OpenOffice.org installs don't like installing more than one copy of the same version which is essential for testing multiple languages
• some translation fixing...

Aha! It was the OpenOffice build failing due to localize errors, I just need to find out what they are now (have install sets but not all files are built properly). If I keep on disagreeing with myself like this, I can provide hours of entertainment...

It was actually an error in my modification to Pavel's build scripts that stopped OpenOffice.org from building (it had built correctly but not produced the install sets). All fixed now. I still think OOo could take some simplification though...

Well it would be nice if it would build. But localize tends to introduce horrible bugs.

The way this works is that for some bizarre reason localizations are merged into text-format resource files. If I can bear it I'll try describe the system some time. But the point it that the tool that merges them sometimes messes it up and produces invalid files. So the build system has a script that fixes some of them and a patch that fixes others. Of course, the patch won't work if you don't have exactly the same set of languages and gsi files... <Sigh/>

I'll try again another day.

Started working on OpenOffice.org stuff again today, wanting to get splash screens etc in. So I set up Pavel's nice build system . It uses ccache so you can pull out a fresh source tree each time without worrying about recompiling stuff.

Except it took hours to get it downloaded. So in the mean time, I reconfigured it to be more modular, so options per platform are listed in separate files. And added a list of language fields (since the openoffice build system seems to have an insane variety of ways of referring to a language) which you can then pull out whatever you want at the right time. Then in languages.selected, I can just say to following to only merge in the appropriate languages:

MERGE_BASTARDS="afrikaans northernsotho zulu"

Trying to build now... If it works, will probably put the build scripts into our cvs...