Jabref cannot to libreoffice

[Soft Rabbit]

Running kubuntu bionic with jabref 2.8.2, I cannot connect jabref to libreoffice. The bug is described and confirmed upstream in Debian for jabref 2.8.1.

The workaround, using openjdk-8 works.

"This is definitely due to a change in how classloaders work in Java
after Java 8. You can refer to this thread for more information:

  https://community.oracle.com/thread/4011800

I spent a little time working on a patch for JabRef to use the

  Class.forName("foo", true, new URLClassLoader(URL[] bar));

pattern if the ClassLoader returned from the system isn't an instance of
URLClassLoader, which addresses the first stacktrace reported, but there
are (at least) two more that need to be addressed in the JabRef sources.

So for the time-being, I recommend installing openjdk-8-jre and starting
jabref like so:

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64 jabref

Running on Java 8, I was able to manually connect to LibreOffice using
the parameters:

  Path to OpenOffice/LibreOffice executable: /usr/bin/libreoffice
  Path to OpenOffice/LibreOffice library dir: /usr/lib/libreoffice
"

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895440