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Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:14:51 -0500
From: Pedro Giffuni <pfg@FreeBSD.org>
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To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: [EXTENSIONS]Alternative for Report Builder?
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On 04/04/12 00:14, Juergen Schmidt wrote:
> On Wednesday, 4. April 2012 at 01:08, drew wrote:
>> On Tue, 2012-04-03 at 17:00 -0300, Ariel Constenla-Haile wrote:
>>> On Tue, Apr 03, 2012 at 09:20:58PM +0200, FR web forum wrote:
>>>>>> One of the volunteers on the ES forum expressed concern about the
>>>>>> Oracle Report Builder (ORB) extension not working on AOO builds: it
>>>>>> seems that the extension installs, but reports previously created with
>>>>>> it do not run.
>>>>>>
>>>>> it is indeed a missing feature but we can't change it for now. But if
>>>>> somebody is interested to build it as an extension and host it somewhere
>>>>> else we will give support here how to do that.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Why Oracle did not donate this OXT (and other like PDF Import)?
>>>> ASF could not contact them to talk about?
>>>>
>>>
>>> The code is under the software grant. The issue here is that these
>>> extensions rely on GPL libraries, though all related code is now under
>>> ALv2:
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> * PDF Import:
>>> http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/ooo/trunk/main/sdext/source/pdfimport/
>>>
>>> That is, someone has to build them (and maintain them) as external
>>> projects.
>>>
>>
> No not really. The problem are the dependent libs as already pointed out. There is no or no easy replacement for this external stuff that is license compatible. Not nice and we would love to have alternatives ...
> If volunteers will provide an alternative implementation that would be Apache compatible then we will continue the support and include it as bundled extensions.

The pdfimport could use pdfbox, however my understanding is that even with
a replacement the feature was not really complete without OCR 
capabilities, (yes
tesseract) but well.. it involves real work(TM).

The other libraries would be excellent examples of how to do extensions.

Hmm... just for reference, I started looking "OOo Extensions for 
Dummies" guide
on google and I got to this page:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/API/Samples

It has a link to the contrib dir in the old SVN server. We haven't 
replicated that
in the Apache SVN. Thankfully the files are in ooo-legacy-svn in 
apache-extras
in case we lose the original SVN.

Pedro.