suka's blog

So is the title provocative enough to get your attention? Good - then let's go on. No kidding, there won't be any further new versions of openoffice-ximian beyond the current 1.3.x-series (based on OOo 1.1.x). Though the reason is not that I've lost interest in providing a better version of OpenOffice.org for all of you, quite the contrary as you will see.

The big differences between openoffice and openoffice-ximian are mostly history now (=the 2.0pre-series). What once started as Ximians special edition of OOo has now evolved into a multi-distribution and -desktop project called ooo-build. It's purpose is to provide a sane build environment for OOo, and that's what it achieves. So future versions of the openoffice-ebuild are going to be based on ooo-build, which not only solves some common problems, but also cuts down the size and complexity of the ebuild considerably. If you dare to, try out the beta-ebuild from my overlay, but please consider this is still totally unsupported and not finished stuff, so don't even think about filing bugs for it ;) After scaring you away: It generally should work fine, especially if you are on x86.

But back to the main question: Why not just keep both? To be honest: It's lots of work with little to no gain - there simply is no sane reason to provide two ebuilds for OOo. Nearly all other distributions are already basing there packages on ooo-build, and since a few days we now have official Gentoo-support in ooo-build, which further helps sanitizing the build. Some of you, who haven't checked out openoffice-ximian for some time, might now think: "So do we all now have to pull in GNOME just for getting OpenOffice.org?". The answer: No you don't, both GNOME and KDE-integration are totally optional, if you want you still can still kill your senses with the default look of OOo ;)

In other news for all of you: When is there going to be a Beta2-based ebuild of openoffice-bin? Answer: When - and if - the still missing language packs are released. Still, the current m122 is quite close (beta2 is actually m125), so check that out in the meantime (if you really want to take a look at a beta-version, also note, that this is package.masked).