(An impudent recycling of material in part already presented elsewhere.)

With the integration of CWS sb83 into DEV300m4 office installations are now split in three.  While there is still a single installation set for an office product, the contained files are not all installed into a single directory tree, but there are now three directory trees:

• The URE tree contains the UNO runtime environment (potentially even shared with other kinds of products).

• The basis tree contains most of the office files, all those that can be shared across differently branded office products.

• The brand tree contains just the brand specific files.  The path of this tree is identical to the path of the complete, pre-sb83 installation sets (e.g., /opt/openoffice.org3.0 on Unix), and all client-facing (executable) files are also located in this tree (e.g., /opt/openoffice.org3.0/program/soffice), so that the restructuring should be more or less invisible for clients.

While the average user will not note much of a difference, developers might have to adjust some old habits.  For example, it might no longer work to just start soffice.bin instead of soffice (Unix) resp. soffice.exe (Windows).  Especially the debugger-addicted Windows developers that routinely start soffice.bin from within the debugger will have to change behavior: use a debugger that allows to follow sub-processes (and start out debugging soffice.exe); attach the debugger to soffice.bin after starting soffice.exe outside the debugger; start soffice.bin in an environment that mimics the environment in which soffice.exe normally spawns it (i.e., with the bin directory of the URE tree and the program directory of the basis tree in the PATH); avoid using a debugger in the first place; etc.—You get the idea.

Things that are still open:

• Multiple simultaneously installed office products (e.g., OpenOffice.org alongside StarOffice) do not yet share the URE and basis trees.  Depending on platform, trying to install multiple office products system-wide will result in error for now, but having multiple “userland installations” works in all cases (remember to use current userland installation scripts coming with DEV300m4—older ones may no longer work).  This will be fixed in a forthcoming CWS, also targeting OOo 3.0 (that will also have to address remaining open issues regarding updating).

• The (sharable) parts of the various products are not yet identical.  Work is ongoing toward OOo 3.0 to either remove the remaining differences or move them to the brand layer.

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

tags: installation openoffice.org