[FFE] LibreOffice 5.0.x for wily

[Björn Michaelsen]

FFE rationale:
* A current LibreOffice major version is a important part of every Ubuntu release -- this is a feature goal

* relevant user visible changes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.0
* under the hood changes: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the-hood-5-0.html

build logs:
* https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+build/7847324 (amd64)
* https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+build/7847325 (i386)

The following testing has been done:
* Tested with users of the libreoffice-prereleases ppa since beta versions
* Tested with users of the LibreOffice Fresh ppa (ppa:libreoffice/ppa) since 5.0, including backports for 15.04, 14.04 and 12.04
* Also tested with the user of the LibreOffice 5.0 (ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-5-0), including backports
* This upstream release is the base of the Doc Viewer for the Ubuntu Phone
* The build has been tested to succeed on powerpc and armhf too

Current 2015-09-03 download stats for the current 5.0.1 libreoffice-core package which was uploaded on 2015-08-28 (so covering 1 week):
wily: amd64 182, i386 13
vivid: amd64 6919, i386 1196
trusty: amd64 21153, i386 7795

So more than 30.000 installations, not counting those from the libreoffice-5-0 ppa.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

I'm symphatetic to this in general, but as we are now rather late in the game: Was 5.0 tested against its quite numerous reverse build and binary dependencies? i. e. does nlpsolver, writer2latex, oolite, or octave-io still work with 5.0? What about the various extensions like hyphen-* or mythes-*, and libreoffice-voikko?

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

Build-time dependencies:
- nlpsolver, writer2latex both need a trivial classpath fix to build against libreoffice 5.0, I will provide updates along with LibreOffice
- libreoffice-voikko builds fine against libreoffice 5.0.1
- octave-io has no buildtime dependency on libreoffice
- oolite ftbfs in unrelated objective-c compile and fails against libreoffice 4.4.4 too :/

As for the runtime testing: LibreOffice itself has more functionality than one soul could manually test in one cycle, so I dont get to test extensions myself (neither was that or could that ever have been done). Against the 30.000+ users installing it from the LibreOffice ppa, whatever I would do as manual testing would be pointless. Thus the early push of these packages to the ppa -- and the close watching for bug reports on both launchpad and upstream at TDF.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Thanks. Please go ahead then, and land everything at the same time if you can, so that we don't introduce new FTBFS into wily.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

I noticed this in .changes for libreoffice: - use internal libwps, opencollada, collada2gltf, libcmis, cppunit.
Without looking any deeper just now, that feels very wrong. Either there should be more rationale as to why this was suddenly changed, or it's misdescribed (I see in changes merged from Debian changes in versions for some of these).

There's also mentions of disabling -evolution and -kde temporarily because parts they depended on were uninstallable in Debian -- they might not be uninstallable in Ubuntu. I think it would be better to double-check them and keep them available if they were already available in previous releases, since it would otherwise mean a regression for some users.

Finally, is it normal for libreoffice and libreoffice-l10n to have exactly the same changelog? Even if they come from the same upstream source tarball, they appear to be two different source packages, and in the case of -l10n, at least some of the changelog entries wouldn't mean anything.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

For nlpsolver and writer2latex, which also need to be changed with this upload:

  * fix build against LibreOffice 5.0 series

^ Please explain (shortly) in changelog what the change was, if it makes sense to do so in changelog -- by that I mean, something more along the lines of "update classpath to fix build against LibreOffice 5.0 series". It's slightly longer, but precise changelog entries make for much easier reviewing, both for sponsors and archive admins when during freezes (or even for tracking down issues years from now).

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

The reason for the most of the internal libs is that there was major breakage from them from the gcc5 transition, and this is the package that was tested as is PPA. Bumping LibreOffice to 5.0.x and changing those back to system libs (which is untested by end users in PPAs) at the same time is too high a risk.

LibreOffice 5.0.2.2 should be tagged upstream on ~2015-09-15, once that tag is there. I will upload a build of that going back to system libs and plan to get it sponsored again.

Ubuntu has stopped shipping libreoffice-evolution since Ubuntu 12.10, so no change there.

We are building libreoffice-kde, just as we did with the the current 1:4.4.4~rc3-0ubuntu2 in wily. Note that this upload is a three-way merge between the Debian package branch (which itself contains multiple merges), libreoffice PPA builds for 5.0 and previous LibreOffice 4.4 uploads in wily. This is inherently nonlinear, and a .changes file assuming a linear progression has by definition be unable to fully represent this. Thus for the first upload of a major series, please see: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-openoffice/libreoffice.git/log/?h=ubuntu-wily-5.0 Note that once LibreOffice 5.0 is in wily, we will have an merge-free (relevant and urgent changes from Debian will get cherry-picked) and linear progression of changes that can and _will_ be represented properly in the .changes file then.

The libreoffice-l10n source package is not a separately maintained entity, it is generated entirely from the libreoffice source package with "./debian/rules update-l10n". All changes to it happen in the ./debian of the libreoffice source package and are tracked in version control there. It existence is an unfortunate hack needed to work around limitations of discspace on some of our buildds. This is documented in ./debian/README in libreoffice-l10n (and thus also in ./debian/debian-l10n/README in the libreoffice source package).

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

mathieu-tl wrote:
> ^ Please explain (shortly) in changelog what the change was

Added "adjust classpath". see: http://people.canonical.com/~bjoern/wily/ffefix/

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

On 09/09/2015 11:02 AM, Björn Michaelsen wrote:
> The reason for the most of the internal libs is that there was major
> breakage from them from the gcc5 transition, and this is the package
> that was tested as is PPA. Bumping LibreOffice to 5.0.x and changing
> those back to system libs (which is untested by end users in PPAs) at
> the same time is too high a risk.

sorry, no. the current LO version in wily is built using GCC 5 with these
external dependencies, afaics. sounds like laziness, not risk ;-P

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

doko wrote:
> sounds like laziness, not risk

Its more work to reply to this accusation than to toggle that switch, making it highly unlikely to be related to laziness. LibreOffice 5.0.x being rather different from LibreOffice 4.4.x makes it quite likely to be related to risk. Feel free to disagree, of course.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

On 09/10/2015 01:28 AM, Björn Michaelsen wrote:
> doko wrote:
>> sounds like laziness, not risk

just want to point out that you removed the smiley. don't know why, and won't
offer an excuse for further accusations.

> Its more work to reply to this accusation than to toggle that switch,
> making it highly unlikely to be related to laziness. LibreOffice 5.0.x
> being rather different from LibreOffice 4.4.x makes it quite likely to
> be related to risk. Feel free to disagree, of course.

Yes, I disagree. Afaics this is what is done in Debian unstable, and what you
could prove with an upload to a PPA.

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

5.0.x is in wily, closing.