Proposed F19 Feature: Apache OpenOffice

[Andrea Pescetti]

Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 04:55:55PM +0000, James Hogarth wrote:
>> Since this has been approved I'm curious as to the method by which the
>> non-conflict with LO is to be achieved...

We've looked at 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:EnvironmentModules under FESCo's 
recommendation. If someone has an example of two packages from Rawhide 
successfully implementing this, it would be great.

> I don't know the answer to this.  Hopefully Andrea is pondering it and
> working with the libreoffice maintainers if he needs to coordinate any
> changes with them. He could fill us in if he wants.

We will definitely try and work with the LibreOffice maintainers. But we 
are not quite there about conflicts yet: you will remember from this 
thread that the situation is not so clear, and that for example the 
upstream LibreOffice does not ship the conflicting "soffice" alias while 
Stephan Bergmann, who is a well-known and experienced developer, 
clarified it is still useful in a number of cases and that it will be 
kept in Fedora.

>> I was browsing the AOO archives when I came upon Andrea's thread there about
>> AOO in F19...

Reading the OpenOffice dev list may be a lot of fun! Your (James') 
recommendation to read the full thread is perfect, but for those who do 
not have the time to read it all, remember that the new OpenOffice dev 
list, even though it was born in 2011, is on par with this list in 
traffic, that it has around 450 subscribers (many of which like to post 
quite frequently), and that the Apache mailing list interface 
unfortunately does not allow easy thread linking/navigation, so in 
general you end up reading messages out of context. By comparison, 
imagine someone having to pick a few messages from the Cinnamon 
discussion on this list to summarize it... you would end up with some 
confusion.

Another point worth knowing about the Apache lists in general is that 
they apply "lazy consensus": if there is no opposition to a proposal in 
3 days, it's considered accepted. So it can perfectly happen that there 
is no positive feedback about a proposal, since that is the default.

>> there is a lot of dispute surrounding the oowriter etc situation...

It will be clarified. The concern there started with the assumption that 
"yum install OpenOffice.org" would install something else. It doesn't, 
of course. So the following discussion is largely irrelevant, but again 
we will be following the FESCo's recommendation here.

>> This made me think of the reminder that had to be given to Oracle about the
>> Fedora principles and how friendship is a key one...

If there is anything that you ("you"=="James" here, sorry for lumping 
two answers together) feel good to clarify, please do. I surely won't 
get offended if there is anything more to know. (I understand that 
Oracle is mentioned just for reference, as clarified later).

> As Fedora has experienced internally many time, contributors to a project
> can say anything they want as an individual but that doesn't mean the
> project is heading in that direction.

Same for Apache Openoffice, obviously.

>> There's been little discussion of this since the earlier part of the month on
>> either mailing list  [...] So what's the plan in mind?

There's a separate thread about configure options which is about the 
Fedora packaging. I'll post updates there later this week, and I'll 
probably also take your suggestion to open a wiki page to summarize the 
ongoing work, since I really don't want to force anyone to read all 
threads in the OpenOffice dev list to stay up-to-date!

>> Is the existing orphaned openoffice.org package in Fedora going to have Andrea
>> as a maintainer and then this new code committed?
>> Is this considered to be a completely fresh new package to go through the usual
>> new package guidelines (plus sponsorship for a new packager)?
> For this specific question -- policy is that packages which are
> retired/deprecated need to go through re-review to get back into the
> dirtibution.  So it's pretty much equivalent to a fresh new package where
> the packager would need sponsorship if they aren't already in the packager
> group.

We are basing on the old openoffice.org package at the moment, but if 
policy is really similar then it doesn't make a big difference at this 
stage. Admittedly, I've very little interested in the "political" side 
of packaging at the moment, so it's enough for me to know that, 
technically and procedurally, the two ways are roughly equivalent.

>> Will Andrea be maintainer of the package or someone else in the AOO group?
> Andrea will need to speak to this as well.

I will be one of the packagers. I expect a couple of other Apache 
OpenOffice committers to be packagers too. If someone else wants to join 
or give advice, this is totally welcome: and remember that, despite what 
you may have heard around, no paperwork is needed to contribute to 
Apache OpenOffice, just jump in.

Regards,
   Andrea.