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Revision as of 00:17, 31 January 2013 by Pescetti (talk | contribs) (Amend language as requested on the Fedora devel list: leading -> extremely popular (the sentence had been copy-pasted from the OpenOffice site))


Apache OpenOffice

Summary

Add Apache OpenOffice, the free productivity suite, to Fedora.

Owner

  • Email: pescetti@apache.org

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 19
  • Last updated: 2013-01-29
  • Percentage of completion: 5%

Detailed Description

Apache OpenOffice (formerly OpenOffice.org) is an extremely popular free and open-source office software suite.

Donated by Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation in 2011, it is now developed and supported by a thriving community; it graduated from the Apache Incubator in October 2012 and it is now an Apache Top-Level Project.

Two new versions, 3.4.0 and 3.4.1, were released in the last 8 months and a major update, 4.0, is in the works and scheduled for April 2013. Versions 3.4.0 and 3.4.1 totalled 35 million downloads so far (not counting mirrors).

To be clear, this proposal is about merely adding Apache OpenOffice: it doesn't affect existing office suites included in Fedora and it doesn't require that Apache OpenOffice is made the default office suite in Fedora.

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora will be able to offer an extremely popular productivity suite, often used to interoperate with Windows users too.

Version 4.0 of OpenOffice brings major and very visible improvements, such as a new and more modern user interface, which are enough to differentiate OpenOffice from other free office suites, like LibreOffice and the older OpenOffice versions (known as "OpenOffice.org" at the time).

Since the graduation of OpenOffice as a top-level Apache project is relatively recent (October 2012), Fedora could be one of the first distributions to include it after the name change.

Scope

Packaging is the main issue here. The default OpenOffice build process produces RPM packages, but there are major changes to be done to obtain a set of RPM packages and matching SRPMs suitable for inclusion in Fedora.

The current development builds have been configured to produce packages based on the current product name: this allows to avoid name clashes with older versions of OpenOffice.

The /usr/bin/soffice alias is still a problem since (in the Fedora packages) it would conflict between LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice: it is recommended to fix it in the LibreOffice packages too, at least using the Alternatives system.

How To Test

Testing would need to ensure that Apache OpenOffice can be successfully installed in Rawhide, make sure that it can be installed together with other office suites (and especially with LibreOffice), with the help of the Alternatives system if needed, and that it can work as expected if it is the only office suite installed in the system.

User Experience

Users will get access to a robust, modern, supported free office suite, often the suite of choice for Windows users who are becoming interested in free and open source software and who would appreciate to find it in the standard Fedora repositories.

Dependencies

A considerable cleanup has been performed since the 3.3.0 times (when Fedora shipped ooo-build and not a pristine copy of OpenOffice anyway). No other packages depend on Apache OpenOffice. FreeBSD already includes Apache OpenOffice in their packages and contributed back some work needed to align it to the latest versions of some dependencies.

Contingency Plan

If version 4.0 is not ready in time for Fedora 19 but packaging is satisfactory, we can ship version 3.4.1.

If instead packaging is still unsatisfactory, Apache OpenOffice won't be a feature, but still Fedora should adapt the conflicting LibreOffice packages and possibly implement the Alternatives system for the shared "soffice" alias, so that it is possible to include Apache OpenOffice in the Fedora Updates as a proposed new package later.

Documentation

Release Notes

  • Fedora 19 includes Apache OpenOffice (formerly OpenOffice.org), the leading free and open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. Apache OpenOffice is available in many languages and it is now developed by the Apache Software Foundation.

Comments and Discussion