Proposed F19 Feature: Apache OpenOffice

[Martin Sourada]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:36:57 -0500 
Bill Nottingham wrote:

> Martin Sourada (martin.sourada at gmail.com) said: 
> > > I'm an Ambassador and this proposal is confusing me.
> > > We have LibreOffice in our repositories; I think that bring back
> > > Apache OpenOffice generates only confusion between users, not
> > > freedom of choice.
> > > 
> > The confusion is already there in Windows world, linux user should
> > be more capable of treating it as freedom of choice instead of
> > confusion. Also, since Apache took over OpenOffice.org and put it
> > out of incubation, it seems the development has been progressing
> > rather well and in a different direction than LibreOffice. While
> > both started from the same point, they're going to be different
> > office suites with different feature sets, different UIs, different
> > devs, etc.
> > 
> > I think it's beneficial to provide Fedora users with the choice of
> > installing either, or even both, provided there's enough interest
> > among the devs to make it so. From a user point of view, I think
> > the main manpower for F19 should go into getting it into repos and
> > solving *all* conflicts. They should be parallel installable and
> > should not conflict even at runtime with each other. Especially the
> > runtime conflicts would be really confusing to (some of) our users.
> 
> Oh, geez, 'choice' again.
>  (c.f.
> http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-January/msg00861.html)
Lol, FWIW, I mostly agree with this one.

> 
> I mean, if someone wants to package AOO, more power to them, I guess.
> But the idea that having a random user who says "hey, I need to edit
> an office doc" should choose between LibreOffice and AOO (and
> Abiword, and Scribus, and Calligra, and ...) when they don't have the
> information in front of them to make that decision in a coherent
> fashion is not what I think we should be doing, any more than
> dropping unfamiliar users to a screen where they pick between
> GNOME/KDE/Cinnamon/MATE/XFCE/LXDE/Blackbox/WindowMaker/Sawfish/E17/TWM
> is a good idea. 
> 
> It feels like designing a system for people who choose and compare
> software, as opposed to desinging a system for people to *use*
> software. Pick a set of defaults and make them great - don't punt it
> all to the user.
> 
Yes, defaults needs to be sensible and usable and for many people
that's what they end up with. I'm not saying we should go and have AOO
installed by default, but available in repos in a state that does not
conflict with LO (and other office suites *in official repos*) ;-) Think
about sysadmins, multi-user systems, ... Seeing a bug report saying "My
LO Writer segfaults with this error while AOO is installed" isn't
exactly helpful, but not having AOO isn't a solution. Hence I say OK to
adding AOO, as long as it wont conflict with LO both as package and in
runtime. 

Unlike pulseaudio (in the above linked thread), AOO is
end-user GUI application, not a library/daemon/sound-server/whatever
used to get the wanted sound to your headphones (that by design
interferes with anything else trying to do the same) ;-) By adding AOO
we're not breaking some third app, we might break LO and that's exactly
what I consider critical not to do. Is it doable? Are there people
willing and able to do that? If yes, sure, let them.

Martin
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