Proposed F19 Feature: Apache OpenOffice

[Martin Sourada]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2013 22:07:02 +0000 
Debarshi Ray wrote:
> So do we have multiple kernels in Fedora?  We offer .deb variants of
> Fedora?
Let me say one thing: if you're going by examples, go with proper ones.
There is vast difference of work needed to support two kernels and work
needed to support two office suites. You know kernel is the base upon
everything runs, right? Please, don't make the most basic component
that cannot be even switched without a whole lot of work as an example
for choices. You just cannot support two kernels in one distribution.
It's unsustainable amount of work, many tools/libs would have to have
two versions shipped depending on the used kernel... This is totally
different from having two *end-user apps*.

> (Once upon a time Epiphany had multiple backends, before it adopted
> WebKit as the only one [1]. So we atleast gave up on some "choice"
> there.)
Yes, because there's a really lot more work need to have two backends
(epiphany-webkit/epiphany-gecko) than two frontends (e.g. epiphany,
midori) working. Needless to say that the backends usually conflict in
runtime, unlike the frontends. And yes, I'm strongly against having AOO
in repos *if* it'll conflict in runtime with LO.

I'm starting to feel you are advocating the single app approach for
everything... That's just nuts, unless you're building a proprietary
device you do not want your users to tackle with. It's not just about
choice. The choice is already here. You can install AOO from upstream
(they even provide RPMs). But that's a road to hell. We package things
to make it easier for our users to install software, not to offer them
the choice. Everyone capable can ./configure & make & make install... Is
there anyone willing to do the packaging work for AOO? Yes? Than why the
hell should we stop him? AOO is *not* LO, will likely be even more
different in the future; and it's not some base component like package
manager, kernel, pulseaudio...

Should we just limit ourselves to having only some default apps for
each task and leaving the rest to 3rd party sources (e.g. upstream)? I
don't think so. Having to choice might be hard sometimes (yes, I had
the very same reaction as you, when I stared at IIRC RH7 anaconda
explaining the difference between KDE and GNOME by one having KDE and
the other GNOME in the description...), but the choice is already here,
we're just making sure that the user can use whatever he chose easily --
within some reasonable limits. Also, people coming to linux from
windows are (still?) more likely to know about AOO than LO, but many of
them already know about both of them and already made their choice in
Win. We want to make it hard to them to keep their SW of choice on
linux even if the SW in question is FLOSS?

Martin
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