LibreOffice for natty, replacing the current OpenOffice packaging

[Matthias Klose]

Hi,

had to cancel my skiing vacation because of an injury, and had a look at the 
current OOo/LO situation for 11.04 instead.  The OOo packaging is only available 
for version 3.2.1, there doesn't exist any packaging for 3.3 based on our 
ooo-build packaging.  ooo-build is now used in LO, and the packaging is 
converted to use LO.  The uno framework is one of the basic things which is 
shared with the OOo packaging, and I don't see any easy way how to make the two 
uno frameworks from both source packages available. The consequence is that the 
old OOo packages are removed/replaced with the installation of the LO packages. 
  As long as we want to update to *O 3.3 there currently is no other way than to 
go with LO.

The OOo packaging did accumulate a lot of changes, hacks and workarounds, which 
I didn't apply to the LO packaging, plus some Ubuntu specific changes are not 
yet ported to LO 3.3.  As long as there is no libreoffice package in Ubuntu, 
these issues are tracked in [1].  If you report new issues, please tag these 
issues with `lo33'.

Test packages including backports for lucid and maverick can be found at

   https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/ppa/+packages

Note that a reinstallation of the old OOo packages is not automatic and requires 
manual removal of all LO packages before trying the reinstallation.

The packages definitely need some testing, but else they look ok-ish for 
inclusion in natty for alpha-2.  See the list of issues, and maybe target some 
of these for alpha-2 or alpha-3.  The most important thing seems to be the KDE 
build and maybe the ARM build (although it's not yet found anymore on the ARM 
images).

   Matthias

[1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.tag=lo33