The need of change from rpm to generic tar.gz LibreOffice suffer from the OO/Suse/rpm chain to spread the software but today Debian/Ubuntu/.deb are the real path so there no more reason to provide rpm based packaging. I propose to return to generic tar.gz archive and let distributors to customize with their own packaging technologies. I found very usable the way Mozilla.org provide Firefox packaging using only a tar.gz where you just unarchive and run direct (Distributors then provide the specific package). It's totally unusable for a generic people to download and run LibreOffice because require you to -install- the rpm in case of an rpm distribution or convert with alien and install in case of .deb based distribution or...nothing else. When you go to the Mozilla.org website and download Firefox you'll end up with a tar.gz that you can just extract where you want and start there.Thisi is far easy then the actual rpm way (masked into a tar.gz). For now no installer please, just an archive to open and play inside. The use of rpm today it's not neutral. bye L
FWIW, rpm is just another container, so you can install it almost the same way as a Mozilla .tar.gz. You need something like: rpm --dbpath /foo/.RPM_OFFICE_DATABASE --query -a rpm --upgrade --ignoresize --nodeps -vh --relocate /opt=/foo/opt --dbpath /foo/.RPM_OFFICE_DATABASE RPMS/*.rpm If you want to extract the contents of the rpms (it works as a user!) to /foo. (Anyway agreed, it's hard to imagine that on Linux one replaces the distro packages with these universal binaries, so a simple .tar.gz would make sense -- IIRC it's even possible to do that, just that result is not provided ATM. Check the mingw binaries, there you get a .tar.gz already.)
I agree for a tar.gz archive!
From one hand, situation where we have archive with much rpms is not very handy. Suppose, we want to install 32 and 64 bit version at once. From other hand, we can move /opt/libreoffice to another place after installing. It should work.
Hello Luca, *, I think, this is a feature request, not a bug., soI have changed this under "Importance". If you think, I am wrong, feel free to change it back ... ;) Now to your "bug": I think, it would be nice to provide LO as binary packages, but not only as them. I am of the opionion, that we should provide LO as rpm/deb packages as well for people, who prefer that format ... ;) IIRC, it is planned to provide pre-builds (betas, RCs and the like) as binary packages, but I am not sure, when this will happen, sorry ... :( But maybe this leads to the knowledge, how to build binary packages in a fast and easy way ... ;) HTH Thomas.
Thank you all for your comments. My opinion is that when LO is released as specific binary should be provided in a relocable folder packed with the universal tar.gz archive. I expect to do a simply: tar -xf LO.tar.xf then cd LO and ./soffice this is the way I mean "more usable" At the moment I simply expand .deb and relocate under a personal folder...it works very well...but it's not so usable as I mean...(you need to know how to dpkg that is platform specific, tar.gz is universal instead) But after all, thank you for your patient to answer me, bye L
Due to comment 1 and comment 4, I'm marking this as NEW and agreeing that it's an enhancement request, not a bug. Lowering to low priority as it's clear not much demand, over the course of 17 months we have really only the OP asking for it, a couple triagers have confirmed the request but outside of that, no duplicates reported, no additional input from users. Thanks for the request Luca! Apologies that it sat unconfirmed so long
Of course there's not much demand, because no one uses Linux. But it's an important issue, because the last thing people want is two incompatible distributions messing up with the system-provided office packages.
lol I think the numbers are up to about 5% of the planet - that's not no one ;) but I won't get into a OS war on FDO
Adding self to CC if not already on