OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 is available [LWN.net]

From:		"John McCreesh" <jpmcc-AT-openoffice.org>
To:		announce-AT-openoffice.org
Subject:		[ooo-announce] OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 is now available for download
Date:		Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:58:14 +0100 (BST)
Message-ID:		<84fb79f66df3ed808c8ed94a94b6501a.squirrel@403lrw.homelinux.net>
Archive-link:		Article, Thread

The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce the release of
OpenOffice.org 3.1.1, a minor update to OpenOffice.org 3.1.0 released in
May 2009. OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 (EN-US for Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux,
and Solaris) is available for immediate download from
http://download.openoffice.org. Please contact the appropriate
native-language project http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html
for details of availability in other languages, and the appropriate
porting project http://porting.openoffice.org for details of other
platforms.

Full details of the bugs fixed may be found in the release notes
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.1.1.html. Details of the
security vulnerabilities fixed will be published in our security bulletin
http://www.openoffice.org/security/bulletin.html on September 11th when
the standard public disclosure embargo expires. To our knowledge, none of
these vulnerabilities has been exploited; however, in accordance with
industry best practice, we recommend all users of earlier versions to
upgrade to 3.1.1.

The next version of OpenOffice.org to contain significant new
functionality, OpenOffice.org 3.2, is expected to be available around the
end of November 2009.

The OpenOffice.org Community




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OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 is available

Posted Sep 10, 2009 9:14 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

Openoffice keeps adding fixes and features, and this is good!

What I find strange, however, is that with every new version there is no change at all at one of its most bothering aspects, namely the way localization is managed.

Anyone living in a non-English speaking language will, almost for sure, require a build supporting at least two languages (e.g French and English), or possibly more (French, Italian, and English).

The obvious thing would be to be able to download and install some "generic" openoffice packages and then install an English and one or more localized language packs.

However, the only thing that appears to be possible with the official Openoffice from the openoffice.org site is to get a localized installer providing one non-English language and English. This already makes it impossible to have combinations like French + Italian + English. Yes, I know that in principle language packs should exist, but finding an updated version on the official mirrors is - so to say - slightly hard.

To make the matter worse, for many localized installers, no 64 bit builds exist at all (e.g. Italian).

Distributions (should) come to the rescue with it. For instance, in Ubuntu I find some core packages and then some packages providing the localized support. And I find both a 32 and a 64 bit build of both.

However, while achieving this goal, distributions also apply many other changes to the code, with the result that what you get with them is not anymore the "official" openoffice, but some modified version (go-ooo, typically I presume). Hence, the consequence of the lack of proper localized support from the official openoffice, is that you cannot use the official openoffice, but you need to rely on some modified version of it.

A couple of issues coming with this are the following:

1) Openoffice gets updated when the distro is updated and not when a new version comes out. If I want Openoffice 3.1.1 Italian 64bit on Ubuntu, I have no chance of getting it, unless someone with good will decides to build it and make it available (e.g. via a PPA).

2) As a side effect of the above, version x.y.z of Openoffice tends to get wide test in linux only months later than it comes out and months later the windows version is already widely downloaded and tested actually making linux a second class citizen even if most development is done on linux itself.

3) Distribution versions of Openoffice have different (and typically more) bugs than the Official version. For instance, Openoffice 3.1.0 from Ubuntu has been having broken subscript/superscript support for many months now, making it completely useless for anybody doing scientific presentations (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/openoffice/+bug/384249)

4) When you report an openoffice bug to your distro, they typically do not have enough resources to fix it themselves (which is understandable), so it remains unfixed (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/openoffice/+bug/384249 again). However, when you report it to the openoffice developers, they just cannot help because their official codebase is different (often not having the bug at all).

To summarize:

- From the poor support of localized versions coming from openoffice (lack of individually installable language packs, lack of 64 bit support from localized version) it derives that many people on linux cannot rely or even try versions of openoffice from the original codebase.

- Which in turns means that the official codbase is only tested by a minority and that all the others get and test different codebases, providing bug reports that at best are late and at worst have nothing to do with the original codebase at all.

How this can help the quality of openoffice is a mistery to me, and why the official development group does not address the localisation issue is also strange.

The only place where I see a good attempt at providing official localized builds and language packs is http://ftp.linux.cz/pub/localization/OpenOffice.org/ Many thanks to them!