Re: The fate of ditaa.jar (9.4.5.)

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

If org-mode wants to support ditaa, it is a requirement to inform the user how to
get the software and install it.  Moving into into a separate repository without
appropriately telling the user introduces the problem that users will miss out
on free software that they would otherwise have used.  Using org should not be made 
more difficult than it already is. 
  

> Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2021 at 8:49 AM
> From: "Arthur Miller" <arthur.miller@live.com>
> To: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>
> Cc: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: The fate of ditaa.jar (9.4.5.)
>
> "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de> writes:
> 
> > Russell Adams <RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.Com> writes:
> >
> >> On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 02:28:57PM +0300, Jarmo Hurri wrote:
> >>> I pulled the latest master and noticed that contrib has been moved into
> >>> a separate repository. I also cloned this contrib repository, but can
> >>> not find the file
> >>>
> >>> scripts/ditaa.jar
> >>>
> >>> in the repo. In fact, there is no directory scripts in the repo.
> >>
> >> I actually never considered this might be packaged with Org. I always
> >> thought I had to install it separately, like my Latex distribution or
> >> PlantUML.
> >
> > Bundling this makes ditaa code blocks just work. Otherwise they won’t
> > work on every org-install.
> 
> The user still needs a Java runtime installed on his/her compute, so
> bundling ditaa.jar gives no guarantee at all that ditaa blocks will just
> work on every org-install.
> 
> Instead a less informaed user, not used to run java programs, might be
> left with a not working application that fails silently or to the user
> incomprehensible error message.
> 
> Better to point user to ditaa's sources/releases and inform it is
> optional with org. That way non-informed user will have to install java
> and ditaa and will at least have an idea where to look when things go wrong.
> 
>