In this lovely post I shall try to describe the bumpy road that got us brand new libreoffice ebuild.
Currently we are preparing on unleashing the libreoffice 3.4 series into the calm waters of the testing land.
Everything started with upstream, that moved away from the build repository to something called bootstrap which uses the autoconf and GNUmake with some parts still using dmake. This results in much nicer system where we can use plain econf and make commands.
Even if this is really cool thing from upstream to do our ebuild accumulated so much cruft it was not exactly easy to update it, so I decided to start from scratch. This took place first in my dev overlay and when it started to compile at least under some occasions I moved the work to the main tree.
Then the week of torture started where I just compiled and compiled and compiled with various options to see if it compiles and added various patches that made it do so (note that all patches were +- merged upstream or are on the way to be merged). Here I really have to thank to everyone trying to compile the beast even if it was changing under their hands. Quite great inspiration goes to geki’s unofficial overlay that has some features over the old in-tree ebuild and to archlinux pkgbuild file that was already migrated to new buildsystem so I used it as light inspiration. Another batch of suprises was unsplitting of all bundled libraries to use system libraries (with one expection you can find in ebuild :P).
Brand new and shiny homepage for the office project was created, along with the irc channel (#gentoo-office) to give realtime support. This was followed with fresh breeze in bugzilla where around 70 bugs were identified and cleaned resulting in just 40 open bugs. And this is pretty awesome!
At the same time I convinced Ian Whyman (gentoo recruit, sabayon dev) to bend the sabayon branding a bit so we get our own cool init screen and about dialog. Which of course is shiny enough for mention, but some people reported me that they see distorted image instead of the init screen. So if you have this version of libreoffice and happen to have such issue please open a bug.
Currently the 3.4.2.3 (which is called 3.4.2 release) is still hardmasked as we happen to have 2 more bugs to be fixed:
* parallel make issue: this I attached a patch that should/could fix it.
* translations issue: this one we need to hack in ebuild as it will take some time to figure out upstream.
On the saddest place in the office team now resides the binary package. We really need to do something with it rather sooner than later. Even you can help us with that by dropping by on the bug and giving us your opinion and suggestions.
As an ending word please keep helping us with compiling the beast and report the bugs, as we can’t catch everything because it takes so damn long to compile it :)
On the completely unrelated matter
I have openSUSE repo on OBS where I created my first 2 rpm packages (krusader, mlocate). If you happen to use openSUSE or so let me know how do they look, as they are first .spec files I created ever.
To be honest, I understand the problem with -bin but I don’t want to see it die. I use it on my laptop because it is impossible to compile libreoffice on it. You could leave it as is, bundle all these libraries but never bring it to stable tree. Just keep it there for those who still have slow machines and they need an office suite. If you think that it is far too broken for the ~testing tree, then you can easily hard mask it explaining the reasons for that.
Well as I said, I don’t really want to remove it. Maybe good solution would be building those libraries as I mentioned on the bug, instead of this huge bundle.
I would really hate to see the -bin die too. I think a really great solution would be providing a gentoo-compiled -bin package, but I know that sounds really tough to maintain. My machine can likely handle compiling LO, but only using it for maybe 1 hour per week, it’s hard to justify compiling it.
I, likewise, have a laptop that will have trouble compiling LO, and so the -bin version is appreciated.
I know, lots of people appreciate the -bin version, but theis one is just walking security threat and we need to solve it somehow.
> is just walking security threat
Not really: Since the bundled libraries are only used if you run libreoffice, it is only
libreoffice-bin itself which might be vulnerable. Every sane user must be aware that such a
huge project probably has some security-issues anyway and should take corresponding care.
Moreover, if you feel that this is still not enough you can still keep it unstable or masked permanently
with a corresponding remark in the package.mask file; then it is in the full responsibility of the user
to decide whether he wants to take the risk.