Hey,
as you've probably seen, the LibreOffice RPMS have recently been orphaned, and I
thought it would be good to explain the reasons
behind this.
The Red Hat Display Systems team (the team behind most of Red Hat’s desktop efforts) has
maintained the LibreOffice packages in Fedora for years as part of our work to support
LibreOffice for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are adjusting our engineering priorities for
RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building
out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by
Workstation users. This is work that will improve the workstation experience for Fedora as
well as RHEL users, and which, we hope, will be positively received by the entire Linux
community.
The tradeoff is that we are pivoting away from work we had been doing on desktop
applications and will cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHEL
version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora.
We will continue to maintain LibreOffice in currently supported versions of RHEL (RHEL 7,
8 and 9) with needed CVEs and similar for the lifetime of those releases (as published on
the Red Hat website). As part of that, the engineers doing that work will contribute some
fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the
way that most people consume LibreOffice in the long term.
Any community member is of course free to take over maintenance, both for the RPMS in
Fedora and the Fedora LibreOffice Flatpak, but be aware that this is a sizable block of
packages and dependencies and a significant amount of work to keep up with.
Matthias
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