ancient LibreOffice

[Avi Greenbury]

Udvarias Ur wrote:
> I just got an update from 1:3.5.4-0Ubuntu1.1 to 1:3.5.7-0Ubuntu4.
> (What happened to everything in between?)

Either they weren't packaged by Canonical for Ubuntu, or you didn't 
update while they were available. The former's probably the more likely.

> Why is Ubuntu still upgrading a version of LibreOffice that is almost
> 2 years old? Especially when there is a newest version contains so
> many bug fixes, as well as many improvements!

Because that's how software releases work. When Ubuntu shipped 12.04,
say, an entire featureset was shipped and support was offered for a
number of years. The agreement is that during the lifetime of that
release no feature changes will occur - the whole thing will continue to
operate as it did when it was released, with the exception of bugfixes
that correct wrong behaviour (including security fixes).

You will normally find that such bugfixes are backported by Canonical;
the version number is not incremented since the package is not truly
upgraded to that release. If version 2.2 had twenty bugfix patches and
ten feature adding patches, applying only the bugfix packages to 2.1
wouldn't get you version 2.2.

Sometimes the packaged software itself has a similar policy, though, and
so it is possible to upgrade it through versions  - LO 3.5.7 is probably
feature equivalent with LO 3.5.4, but less broken.

> I've downloaded the 4.1.2 tarballs. They merely contain deb files. If
>  Canonical doesn't get off their duff soon I'm just going to remove
> the version they upgraded and install the version I downloaded from
> the LibreOffice WEB site!

My 13.04 install has LO 4.0.2-0ubuntu1 in the repositories; you're
probably running a very old release of Ubuntu. If you keep track of the 
six-monthly updates (rather than only LTSes) you'll get more frequent 
updates of the rest of the system.

That said, if you want to keep right up with what LO are doing the only 
way is to install the packges from them - Canonical are not going to 
"get off their duff" because the whole point of shipping a coherent 
release is that you have consistency for the life of that release.

You shouldn't have any problems with installing that package from LO 
(though do remove the current ones first), it would be good to find a 
PPA for it (if one exists), though, else you'll have to keep manually 
redownloading the current deb to keep up-to-date.

-- 
Avi