On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 2:52 PM <club.a...@free.fr> wrote: > Hello GB Mac, > > Le 2023-02-15 06:36, GB Mac a écrit : > > OpenOffice remains a perpetual > > developer project in Linux. > It's a problem to do with your Linux distribution (which you don't > specify). > See with them so that the DEB or RPM package is set online in their > repositories. > > Both the technical and political reality of software installation on Linux, is that Linux distribution repositories never could have been, and never will be, the one and only source of software to install. Repositories legally cannot package commercial software for example, and as the (now obsolete) Autopackage project quite correctly noticed around 2005, and its founder Mike Hearn gave a talk about to Gentoo developers at some conference in those days, the Linux distributions' repository has a monopoly on easy software installation, which distributions use as a political weapon against software that they don't like, whether it isn't UNIX-y enough, or has a strange licence, or isn't popular enough, or they just don't like for some personal reason.
And there is trouble in paradise even for packages that make it into a distro repository. Distributions often ship old versions, and update on an awkward schedule. Inkscape used to have a release schedule where new releases would come out shortly after Ubuntu releases. As a result they had to deal with endless duplicate bug reports, from Ubuntu users installing the old version, and reporting bugs that were already fixed, but with no easy way to install the new version. Eventually Inkscape changed its release schedule to allow Ubuntu to package its latest version, but you can see the problem with this: should tens of thousands of packages really be forced to release in lock-step with Ubuntu? So the problem of 3rd party software installation has plagued Linux since inception: I documented 8 projects that tried to achieve that and compared them in the attached spreadsheet, and there are more. In bug 46333 users wanted an Autopackage of OpenOffice. Luckily in recent years the Linux distributions seem to have finally woken up, and begun officially supporting installation of 3rd party software, Ubuntu with Snap, and Red Hat with Flatpak. LibreOffice already offers Snap, Flatpak and AppImage, although I've found them to be of poor quality. Flatpak can work on Ubuntu too. AppImage isn't sandboxed at all. Snap is a disaster and will probably fail like most Canonical technologies. I definitely think Flatpak is the way to go. However it will require some development. We don't (only) use the standard GTK file dialogs, which automatically go through a "Portal" to allow us out of the sandbox, so we have to use the Portal API to gain permission to read the selected document somehow. Regards Damjan
3rd party software installation.ods
Description: application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet
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