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

[Russell Adams]

On Wed, May 12, 2021 at 11:41:48AM +0200, Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> I have Java, but not ditaa, because Java is packaged in my distribution
> and ditaa is not. My build pipelines use ditaa as shipped with
> org-mode.

My opinion is that Org has integration for many external tools, but
doesn't ship them. I don't think Org should be shipping anything that
isn't Org's own code due to maintainer overhead, potential
legal/license issues, and inconsistency across tools. We don't ship
Latex distributions or gnuplot either.

> So unbundling ditaa breaks my documents when updating org-mode. The same
> for everyone else who used a standard ditaa-setup with org-mode.

I think it's a reasonable request to make of an end user that if you
want to use Org's integration with the tool, you ensure the tool is
installed first. If your Linux distribution doesn't provide a package
for ditaa, file a bug report or a feature request with
them. Alternatively you can install it yourself as it's just one .jar
file.

Perhaps Org should show a better error message if ditaa isn't found.

> Ask the other way round: What is the benefit of removing ditaa from org?
> If you want to force most current org-ditaa users to unbreak their setup
> after update, there should be a significant tangible benefit.

Org's codebase is always undergoing change and right now there's a
significant cleanup effort going on to separate contrib out of core. I
expect removing ditaa was part of that. I defer here to the wisdom of
the maintainers that there is benefit to reorganizing the code base,
even if it's just to simplify their job as maintainers.

I respect that it's causing you some personal inconvenience, however
it's not a major breakage. It should be simple to resolve by
installing locally.


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Russell Adams                            RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.com

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