[807] in athena10
Open Office in locker- now and going forward
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Fri Jan 9 16:30:02 2009
Message-Id: <200901092128.n09LSf4h010106@dit.mit.edu>
To: athena10@MIT.EDU
cc: alexp@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:28:41 -0500
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
Hi everyone,
I have some questions about what to do with Open Office 3 now that
it's been out for a bit.
I'm at the point where I would normally make Open Office 3 the default
version for Athena 9 (it's been available to 9.4 (and 10) users in the
ooffice_v3.0 locker for some time, but not as the default version; the
current 9.4 default is 2.4.2). However the latest version in the
Ubuntu repositories even on Intrepid is 2.4.1, and I'm presuming that
ooffice 3 won't get into Intrepid at all.
So if I do the default switch, users transitioning from Athena 9.4 to 10 will
revert from default ooffice 3 on Athena 9.4 to ooffice 2.4.1 on Athena 10,
which probably isn't a good idea and is likely to cause compatibility
problems.
If I don't switch the default, both Athena 9.4 and Athena 10 users will
continue to have the option (as now) of running ooffice 3 by running:
ooffice -ver 3.0 (Athena 9.4)
add -f ooffice; ooffice -ver 3.0 (Athena 10)
I could go further to actively discourage Athena 10 users from using
ooffice 3 now by making an empty arch/i386_deb40/bin directory in the
office_v3.0 locker (right now arch/i386_deb40 is a symlink to
arch/i386_rhel4 there), but that seems kind of fascist.
I think the right thing to do is leave things as they are now, giving both
Athena 9.4 and 10 users the non-default option to run ooffice 3 if they
want it- I'm open to suggestions though.
This brings up a further question going forward- it's pretty likely
that the most recent available ooffice version at any given time will
be one major version past what's available in the Ubuntu
repositories. I could continue to put the latest available version in
a locker for users who really want it, or we could just say that a
policy decision has been made to only go with the Ubuntu-supplied
version that's slightly older (this issue may come up with other
applications too- I can handle those on a case by case
basis). Thoughts?
Alex
