Bug 157809 - the MSI archive contains all translations and all language dictionaries
Summary: the MSI archive contains all translations and all language dictionaries
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Installation (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
7.6.2.1 release
Hardware: All Windows (All)
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2023-10-17 20:40 UTC by Jérôme
Modified: 2023-11-08 00:22 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

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Description Jérôme 2023-10-17 20:40:22 UTC
My organization encounter difficulties to deploy LibreOffice on Windows boxes with wapt. However my organization is using only one translation for the user interface and about 3 dictionaries. My organization has to split the original MSI file in about 10 parts in order to deploy it.

I extracted the content of the LibreOffice_7.6.2_Win_x86-64.msi archive (345MB) with msiextract :
- the tar-gzipped "resource" directory which contains all translations needs 69MB
- the tar-gzipped language dictionaries in "share/extensions" needs 95MB.

I propose instead :
- a "language pack" MSI archive for each language with the translated user interface and the offline translated help,
- a "dictionary" MSI archive for each language.
Comment 1 m_a_riosv 2023-10-17 21:51:46 UTC
Maybe this page can help:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Deployment_and_Migration
Comment 2 Roman Kuznetsov 2023-10-17 21:54:10 UTC
I think I saw inverse report (to have all language packs in one DMG installer) just for macOS where we had problems with language packs installing

Mike, what do you think about this one?
Comment 3 Mike Kaganski 2023-10-18 05:54:50 UTC
(In reply to Roman Kuznetsov from comment #2)
> I think I saw inverse report (to have all language packs in one DMG
> installer)

Here it is for MSI: bug 124992. No idea about DMG.

> Mike, what do you think about this one?

I think it is absolutely unclear what specific difficulties the organization may encounter. Errors? Precious megabytes consumed on disk? What?

I don't believe there's a real reason to insist that today's applications must avoid inclusion of some information. It is OK to just install everything. It is also OK to use the installer-provided mechanism to only install a specific subset. But if the organization uses some custom procedure, what is the rationale, and the reason for that, which justifies a huge maintenance burden on the community of volunteers? (I'd expect organizations using FLOSS to *suggest* their contributions, not to ask volunteers to increase burden to support niche use cases.)

See also:
bug 142877,
bug 97991.
Comment 4 Jérôme 2023-10-22 08:07:24 UTC
My organization distributes a version of LibreOffice to over 10,000 computers. On each host, wapt downloads the complete MSI archive. Then wapt installs only 1 translation and 3 language dictionaries.
On our large internal network, we are experiencing problems due to the large size of this MSI archive.

A compromise would be :
- an MSI archive without any language-related files,
- one MSI archive per language (translated user interface, dictionary, offline translated help).

This would make it clear to users that they need to install a complete language pack when using a language.
Comment 5 Mike Kaganski 2023-10-22 08:16:30 UTC
(In reply to Jérôme from comment #4)
> A compromise would be :

No. It is not a compromise, it is simply a disaster for everyone except you.
1. People would need to learn to download and install several packages. Installing one package is already a challenge foe many unexperienced users; the already existing requirement to install a second package when you want to have an offline help results in endless flow or "Help me - I'm lost" questions on the Ask site.
2. People would suffer from bad language support. OK, the UI is something that one may safely not install; but e.g. hyphenation package (part of dictionary pack) is essential in *layout* of text written in that language; so missing hyphenation package would make the documents *look* differently on users' systems, which is already a problem. And users would never know which language would be used in a document they receive by email / download tomorrow.
3. TDF would need to develop, build, test, and store hundreds of new packages, with huge overhead in every part.

Simply NO. The "problems due to the large size of this MSI archive" is not a realistic thing today. Just invest into your network, or make the deployment gradual, not all-at-once. Do not put your costs of maintaining your business on everyone in the world.
Comment 6 Mike Kaganski 2023-10-22 08:33:59 UTC
As a realistic option, consider contracting a company that specializes on professional support [1], and then they can create custom packages for you, according to the terms of the contract. That customized distribution is one of the benefits that professional support may provide.

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/
Comment 7 Stéphane Guillou (stragu) 2023-11-08 00:22:13 UTC
I agree with "won't fix" and would also suggest in-house custom installers or contracting someone to tailor that for you.
Cloph, do you agree?