Breezy updates...

[paul cooke]

On Friday 15 April 2005 17:46, Bob Nielsen wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 07:46:56AM -0700, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> > On 4/15/05, Vincent Trouilliez <vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr> wrote:
> > > Boy, Breezy is just one week old exactly, and today was already the
> > > first significant upgrade... 150 packages, and as many MB !
> >
> > the developpers are doing the the sync with the Debian packages, thus
> > all these new packages suddenly appearing.
>
> OO2 isn't even in Debian yet, so it looks like Ubuntu is leading the
> way.

OOo2 won't be in Debian for some time until they have hacked out and written 
around the Java dependent stuff in it.

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/03/22/204244&from=rss

| Several new features of the recently released OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta
| require a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Since Java's license is neither
| free nor open source, a small but vocal minority has responded both strongly
| and negatively. For instance, when NewsForge recently published a review of
| the beta, no other feature attracted as much comment. Some groups, including
| members of the major GNU/Linux distributions, most of whom repackage
| OpenOffice.org (OOo), have responded by looking for alternatives, often
| while cursing the project for the extra work it has dumped on them.       
[...]
|Among FOSS contributors, the reaction was much the same. The responses on the
|debian-openoffice.org, the mailing list for those involved with integrating
|OpenOffice.org into the Debian distribution, are typical of ones in other
|pockets of the community. Anders Breindahl, for example, writes, "I find it
|increasingly worrying that Sun to some extent considers Java to be okay for a
|free office suite.... I think this makes OpenOffice.org less optimal for the
|Free Software community." Similarly, in the same discussion, Sam Hiser, the
|former marketing lead for OpenOffice.org, characterized the change as a
|"challenge" that the FOSS community must answer with other software that's
|more compatible with its philosophy.         
[...]
|At Debian, Chris Hall and René Engelhard, the maintainers for OpenOffice.org
|packages, are also working with GCJ and following developments. According to
|Engelhard, they face an added difficulty because the latest version of GCJ
|and the libgcc1 library are currently in only the unofficial Experimental
|distribution of Debian. To include OpenOffice.org 2.0 in Debian Unstable, the
|distribution into which new packages are initially placed, the two
|maintainers might have to disable all Java-based functionality, as they did
|for earlier versions. Since Java does not meet the Debian Free Software
|Guidelines' definition of free software, these are the only options available
|for including OpenOffice.org in Debian at all.