Proposed F19 Feature: Apache OpenOffice

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 02/06/2013 02:17 PM, James Hogarth wrote:
> On 6 February 2013 12:33, Stephan Bergmann <sbergman at redhat.com
> <mailto:sbergman at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 02/06/2013 02:36 AM, Andrea Pescetti wrote:
>
>         About the "soffice" alias, it still breaks parallel installation
>         in F18
>         (just tried, the desktop integration from OpenOffice conflicts with
>         libreoffice-core). It seems that the upstream LibreOffice
>         packages no
>         longer use the "soffice" alias (at least, the desktop
>         integration only
>         installs "libreoffice3.6"),
>
>
>     Yeah, looks like
>     <http://cgit.freedesktop.org/__libreoffice/core/commit/?id=__b1cf810a8e7342ad5d518528fd5826__6daf6e90ec
>     <http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=b1cf810a8e7342ad5d518528fd58266daf6e90ec>>
>     "LibreOffice branding: make desktop integration work (fix2)" dropped
>     the /usr/bin/soffice symlink from the upstream LO packages, for
>     reasons that escape me---maybe it was just ignorance or an oversight.
>
>
>
> Whether it was dropped upstream or not (you sure on current LO not
> having that?) we're talking about Fedora's packaging here and
> the implication on the changes of behaviour to Fedora users...

Sure; the above is of little relevance for Fedora.

> Just checked my system:
>
>   [me at system ~]$ which soffice
> /usr/bin/soffice
> [me at system ~]$ rpm -qf /usr/bin/soffice
> libreoffice-core-3.6.3.2-8.fc18.x86_64
>
> That commit date was back in 2010 and this was a fresh F18 install and
> not an upgrade as well...
>
> I just grabbed the SRPM for 4.0 from rawhide as well to check and the
> spec file includes %{_bindir}/soffice

And the corresponding comment in the libreoffice.spec "rhbz#499474 
provide a /usr/bin/soffice for .recently-used.xbel" describes one more 
place that relies on the /usr/bin/soffice symlink:  "grep soffice 
~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel" shows entries "exec='&apos;soffice 
%u&apos;" not qualified by an explicit path.

> So there's an expectation of compatibility that exists right now -
> Stephen what's your thoughts on this going forwards?

For the usecases where a /usr/bin/soffice symlink is used for 
applications' programmatic invocation of the office suite, one option at 
least for applications packaged up for Fedora is that they shortcut that 
"search for an office suite" step and directly depend on and reference 
e.g. /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/soffice.

(unoconv comes to mind as an application in that category, and its 
lengthy upstream code to locate the office suite could indeed benefit 
from a Fedora-specific patch.)

This would, of course, only address part of the usecases for those 
symlinks.  For others (like users' expectation to be able to issue 
path-less soffice, oowriter, etc. commands) I have no good idea how to 
solve that.

Stephan