I appreciate and am empathetic to all of those carrying the burden of this and the thousands of other RPM packages.  As a users of Fedora + RPM Fusion + Cinnamon Desktop as my daily laptop driver since 2011, I love Fedora and am a heavy user of Flatpacks.  So thank you all.

That said, I will point out that I have heard of at least 4 enterprise customers who use libreoffice as a headless file conversion utility.  I have seen it used in customer facing production workflows, such as a financial user support website to handle file uploads provided by end users, as well as medical health records systems used by hospitals and doctors offices.  https://www.libreofficehelp.com/batch-convert-writer-documents-pdf-libreoffice/

I am not asking for a change in strategy.  I understand our resource challenges.  I only wanted to share this perspective.  Packaging the RPMS in EPEL could alleviate the pain for these customers in the RHEL 10 timeframe, as well as a container image (maybe built from the rpms pulled from EPEL?).

Hope this is helpful.  And again, THANK YOU!

Terry Bowling
Sr. Product Manager - RHEL Installation & Build Services Experience
Red Hat, Inc.




On Thu, Jun 1, 2023 at 2:31 PM Matthias Clasen <mclasen@redhat.com> wrote:
Hey,

as you've probably seen, the LibreOffice RPMS have recently been orphaned, and I thought it would be good to explain the reasons
behind this.

The Red Hat Display Systems team (the team behind most of Red Hat’s desktop efforts) has maintained the LibreOffice packages in Fedora for years as part of our work to support LibreOffice for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is work that will improve the workstation experience for Fedora as well as RHEL users, and which, we hope, will be positively received by the entire Linux community.

The tradeoff is that we are pivoting away from work we had been doing on desktop applications and will cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHEL version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora.

We will continue to maintain LibreOffice in currently supported versions of RHEL (RHEL 7, 8 and 9) with needed CVEs and similar for the lifetime of those releases (as published on the Red Hat website). As part of that, the engineers doing that work will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the way that most people consume LibreOffice in the long term.

Any community member is of course free to take over maintenance, both for the RPMS in Fedora and the Fedora LibreOffice Flatpak, but be aware that this is a sizable block of packages and dependencies and a significant amount of work to keep up with.

Matthias
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