ITP: StarOffice
Hello,
I'd like to package SUN StarOffice 5.1a. As I can see it's not availible as
a Debian package yet. It's not that easy to build StarOffice Debian
packages, but I think there should be some availible because a lot of
desktop users want it. The way you have to take at the moment is quite
unconfortable.
Nevertheless, there are few problems or questions to solve. The first is,
that I'm not a maintainer yet, so I'd need somebody who would sponsor the
package. Torsten? BTW, how long will it take until NM opens again?
The second is the licence of StarOffice. Are we allowed to distribute
modified version of StarOffice? I don't mean the binaries, but StarOffice
uses a script for setting some environment varibles and starting, which
I rewrote, but not completly. My script uses still some lines of code of
the original script as they are OK. The Licence of StarOffice only says
that the software may not be modified, decompiled, deassembled, etc. So
does it mean we aren't allowed? Perhaps somebody is a bit better than me
in legal things and can prove that. BTW, is there already the source of
StarOffice availible. This would be the easiest solution.
There is not tarball of StarOffice, it uses instead on own setup program.
This makes the thing a bit harder. You can use the option '/n' for
performing a network installation. So each user only has to install a few
MB. I did this and "tar"-ed the network installation. I wrote a Makefile
which will install the components at the right position in the filesystem
hierarchie. It has to do quite a lot sym-links, so that everything is on
the right place, but StarOffice is still able to find the components. I
thing that's the best solution, is it?
If the staroffice5 Debian package is installed the users have to run
sosetup (I renamed it from setup...) which copies a few MB in his/her
home directory. After the StarOffice can be run using the command
'soffice'.
I'm not finished with it yet, but I thing main things are working.
Any comments?
Roland
--
Roland Bauerschmidt -- Freiberger Str. 17, 28215 Bremen, Germany
e-mail: roland@copyleft.de, phone: +49 421 3763482, fax: +49 421 3763483
Debian GNU / Linux -- the choice of a GNU generation
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