[UFO Chicago] Even In The Future, Nothing Works

[Matthew T. Gibbs]

> From: Jay F. Shachter <jay at m5.chicago.il.us>
>
>
>Friends,
>
>After working on it for more than a week, I finally finished building
>LibreOffice 5.1.2.2.0.  I write for two reasons.  One is to crow that
>I succeeded in completing this complex and difficult build.  The other
>is to complain that the build was complex and difficult.  We have had
>higher-level programming languages now for more than 60 years.  Why is
>it still the case that building any nontrivial program never works
>right the first time?  Why is software installation a job that
>requires skill and intelligence?  Why can't I just build the bloody
>thing by typing "build" or words to that effect?  Libreoffice is
>actually among the best of them, it automatically downloads some of
>the zillions of packages on which it depends -- but not all of them --
>when you build it, and then builds them too, but that isn't a solution
>you want to use because you end up with nonpublic shared libraries
>that, for all practical purposes, cannot be used by anything except
>another running instance of Libreoffice.
>
>And even if you chose that solution, and chose the simplest possible
>build, and accept all defaults, nothing works right the first time.
>For example, in the case of the boost libraries (which Libreoffice
>needs), I actually had to change the source code because they kept on
>wanting to include quadmath, which in my case I have not got.  And the
>newest version of jpeg does not use a prefix of /usr/local when you
>configure it without a --prefix= option, instead it puts things
>perversely into /opt/libjpeg-turbo without telling you that it has
>done so, a directory that ldconfig knows nothing about, so even after
>installing it the link editor still can't find it and you get
>unresolved external references to a library that you know you just
>bloody installed 2 minutes ago.
>
>So I finally have a working (I think, it would take a year to test
>everything) Libreoffice on my computer, but I cannot in retrospect
>assert that the time I spent building it was worth it.  And I'll be
>d....d if I'm ever going to build anything even more complicated, like
>chromium.  I don't care if chromium is supposed to be open-source, you
>give me a binary or I am not going to use it.
>
>(People who wish to reply are requested to refrain from uttering
>condescending remarks to the effect that I should simply install
>Libreoffice from my distribution's repositories.  I am running SLES,
>which does not provide repositories, unless you pay for them.  And
>although the same is true for, e.g., RHEL, RHEL systems can use the
>repositories of shadow distributions like CentOS and Scientific Linux
>and Springdale; SLES systems cannot, there are no shadow distributions
>of SLES, you either have to pay for a repository or build everything
>from source, as if you were one of those weenies wasting their lives
>on linux bloody fromscratch dot org.)
>


Hi Jay-

I agree with your frustrations about how this stuff seemingly hasn't progressed, and I myself have been frustrated by it sometimes with even simple packages and that different distributions has been installing things in non-standard locations for whatever reason that can also cause some problems.

I'd like to point out though that openSUSE's BuildService does offer some (unofficial) packages for SLES including Libreoffice.  See here:

<http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LibreOffice:/5.1/>

Also, you can sign up for a free BuildService account and build stuff there in a clean environment against several different SUSE and non-SUSE distributions and it'll make a repository for you for easy installation.

Matt