openoffice.org metapackage shouldn't depend on the huge, rarely needed filter-binfilter package (provides legacy StarOffice formats support)

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas]

Binary package hint: openoffice.org

In Ubuntu 8.04 LTS openoffice.org metapackage depends on the huge, rarely needed openoffice.org-filter-binfilter package, which provides legacy StarOffice 3.0-5.2/StarWriter 1.x-2.x formats support:

In all older Ubuntu versions openoffice.org metapackage just recommended or suggested binfilter (filter-so52) package

Users wanna have a possibility to have a smart and smooth openoffice.org suite upgrades, but hard depending on unneeded legacy components do not allow this possibility (as the majority of users don't need binfilter package) .

openoffice.org-filter-binfilter package takes 24-27 MB size and in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS development cycle Colin Watson reported a bug about moving openoffice.org-filter-binfilter to Suggests, see bug #159133 (excessive Recommends), but this bug was closed and this package was left as hard dependency :(

According to Debian Policy (http://debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-binarydeps) Colin Watson was right - openoffice.org-filter-binfilter should be just suggested, as this package is needed only in unusual installations:

"Depends declares an absolute dependency.
    The Depends field should be used if the depended-on package is required for the depending package to *provide a significant amount of functionality*."

"Recommends declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.
    The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together with this one in all but unusual installations."

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

openoffice.org is a meta package which express purpose is to install the entirety of openoffice.org. You can install parts of openoffice.org by using their individual package names if you do not want all of it.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Since Debian has changed this in 2.4.1 and in interests of keeping our diff with Debian small I have adopted this change as well.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Some comments. First, Suggests: are almost worthless in Ubuntu, or with graphical package managers in general. If we don't install it by default, such plugins basically don't exist from an user's POV. What should happen is that if you try to open such an old document, OO.o tells you to install the missing package (and preferably provide a "Do that now" button). I'm fine with changing that in intrepid, but it's not at all an appropriate change for stables. Please revert it for the hardy update.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

In order to avoid an expensive respin/reupload of OO.o, we can explicitly seed -filters-bin for hardy. But please, in the future, don't do such kind of structural changes for stables.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Oh, sorry. Since we don't actually install the entire openoffice.org metapackage on the CDs, we cannot actually work around this. Please revert and reupload. Thanks!

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

I guess -l10n doesn't need a respin for this. I kept it in the queue and will accept it once the new oo.o is availab.e

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Actually quite a bit of OpenOffice.org would need to be rewritten for issues like this. It is expected by upstream that either all of OpenOffice.org is installed or none of it is. Some of the other problems include Java not working right, corruption of formulas in documents if openoffice.org-math is not installed, etc. Just finding all the spots that need to be changed if not all of OpenOffice.org is installed is pretty hard since until you encounter a problem you wouldn't even know to look in that area, eg the formulas issue that I recently received a bug report about.

I will revert the change back to a Depends but it was never a Suggests as was commented on, it was reduced to a Recommends. Ubuntu still doesn't auto-install Recommends but might in time for Intrepid (Debian already does).

Chris