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Well your excerpts aren't really clearing up all confusion IMO, but even the original message is somewhat confusing too:

  >> … 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.
Here you left out the part that they'll do that only until older RHEL releases, that still have LibreOffice support are EOL:

  > 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. 
I.e., they don't plan to fix anything besides issues w.r.t. the (only older?) release branches supported by RHEL <= 9, until that is EOL too.

And while they first hint that only RPMs packages are affected and implicitly suggest that distribution via Flatpack is the way forward (yuck), they then contradict that part by telling that they'd find it OK if a volunteer picks up LibreOffice support for both, RPM and Flatpack, up again in Fedora. I.e., reading that it seems that they don't plan to actually support the Flatpack distribution either? Or is this a Fedora specific Flatpack repo?




No, they plan to maintain the RPMs for RHEL 7/8/9 and to contribute fixes for Flatpak, which is how they expect people to consume LO (without Red Hat support) in RHEL 10 and perhaps in future Fedora releases.

I for one am a periodic LO user (for both work stuff and personal sheets like tax returns) on Fedora and will switch next week to Flatpak to start reporting bugs. I already use Flatpak for OBS, Ferdium and VSCode, with no issues except that I need to use ssh access to open VSCode projects on localhost (because of some known sandboxing issues).

> support for both, RPM and Flatpak, up again in Fedora

Fedora has a Flatpak repository that is separate from FlatHub. LibreOffice developers post their builds to FlatHub, and those are usable from Fedora without involvement from Fedora developets.


> Fedora has a Flatpak repository that is separate from FlatHub.

Yeah, it sounded a bit like this, but with all those comments here and LWN I started to get confused myself.

And I definitively could have just looked it up so appreciate it all the more that you cleared it up to me, many thanks!


I think you may be misinterpreting it. They’re saying “we’re not maintaining LibreOffice RPMs beyond the current supported versions of RHEL, because we think Flatpak is the way forward, but we recognise that there are currently problems with it, so we will put some effort into fixing those, so that us no longer offering RPMs isn’t disastrous”.


Yes indeed, seems like I got a bit confused myself here, thanks!




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