[Mageia-dev] Why does Mageia's Libreoffice obsolete OOo ?

andre999 andre999.mga at laposte.net
Fri Sep 2 03:06:53 CEST 2011


I realise that many might think of LibreOffice as being nothing more 
that a more recent version of OpenOffice, but upstream LibreOffice 
package does not touch OpenOffice.
It can be legitimate for a user to want both LibreOffice and OpenOffice 
installed at the same time.
Which is my case.  (To overcome a missing feature, which having both 
running at the same time partially solves.)

Recently I installed Mageia's package of LibreOffice (to replace the 
upstream package of the same version I had already installed, only to 
get rid of a persistant update suggestion),
and it attempted to uninstall OpenOffice.
(Only partially succeeding, probably since I had the official package, 
and not mdv's package installed.  I had to reinstall Openoffice to make 
it work properly.)

So I think we should remove  "Obsoletes: openoffice.org" from the 
Libreoffice spec (line 190 of the latest spec in cauldron), to avoid 
this problem.
If someone has Openoffice installed and wants to uninstall it, they can 
always do so explicitly.

This brings up an important point.  If there is a new application which 
provides the same function as an existing application, but no conflict 
exists between the 2 applications, why should we obsolete the existing 
application.
I have seen this on other occasions, such as between Mozilla Seamonkey 
and Iceape.
But at the same time, we don't do that for text editors. (e.g. gedit, 
geany, and medit, all based on gtk+ -- which can similarly all be used 
at the same time.)

I think we should have a policy to _not_ obsolete applications if there 
are no real conflicts between them.
I'm not suggesting this for libraries, but for applications, especially 
gui applications.
To do otherwise is to unnecessarily impose our views of what users 
should be permitted to install and use.

-- 
André



More information about the Mageia-dev mailing list