Lets start with the happy stuff we have in Gentoo.
Andreas (dilfridge) created the binary package for 4.1.3.2 which means we have latest upstream provided as binary for stable users. He also managed to get Patrick (bonsaikitten) to provide HW where we can build the testing tree based version too. So stay tuned the binary will soon TM arrive for testing tree.
There seem to be some issues with portage lately wrt subslots and tracking the rebuilds so if you have build collisions while emerging this just try to mess with –backtrack option and put there some value bigger than 30.
I spent some time updating the dependencies and prepped the switches for 4.2 release so we should be on good track there. But as always it would be nice to have more people in the team working on individual bumps (it is just copy from one version to another most of the time) but I can’t be everywhere and sometimes I overlook things. So if you are interested just drop by #gentoo-office irc channel and we can get you hooked. Later on the run you can became also developer as this position is suited for contributors who want to get involved more.
Now the other half about openSUSE state
Here goes the sad part. As libreoffice team moved to collabora it left openSUSE without any packager for the suite. Part of the libreoffice team responsibility was also maintaining the hunspell dicitionaries which is even worse as it impacts everybody who uses the hunspell for spellchecking (kde/gnome/…).
So we need people interested in maintaining all the stuff updated and working. Most of the tasks now are quite complex as the packages are written with compatibility for sle10 in mind. We can finally give up on that and start cleanups (which I intend to do during my free time at some point) but I could use help a lot. So if you are interested in libreoffice future on openSUSE and know how to write “bit” complex spec files just drop me a mail or ping me on irc so we can talk about it.
Some sort of plan I have with this:
1) Reduce the repositories used. As I am all alone working on this I will remove all the stable/unstable stuff and provide only :Factory repo which will be built against Factory and supported openSUSE versions (12.2/12.3/13.1). Unstable will be utilized only for testing of beta releases before next minor bump if needed (4.1.0 -> 4.2.0).
2) Cleanup all the stuff in the libreoffice package to have it maintainable with less dificulity (now it takes quite few hours just to bump from 4.1.2 to 4.1.3 which is bugfix release and that is not optiomal).
3) Probably solve the dictionaries situation for good by using only the dictionaries from libreoffice repo. Where we can say to people if they want support they just need to git commit it to libreoffice git repository. Which has nice sideefect of improving spellchecking for english and others.