Re: [PLUG] OpenOffice vs LibreOffice

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2014 at 8:06 PM,  <r-redirected@thefreemanclan.net> wrote:
>
> I believe you're a gentoo user, libreoffice at least offers source.  I
> haven't bothered trying recently, it's easier for me while running Slackware
> to just use a slackbuild script that produces a package from the Debian
> packages and be done with it, but I did successfully compile both
> LibreOffice when it first came out and OpenOffice when it was stagnating and
> not including what I then considered needed features like useful macro
> tools.
>
> http://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/source-code/
>
> Needless to say, pay close attention to the documentation on how to build
> LibreOffice.  I didn't and thought horrible thoughts about the project until
> I did read the docs.

I've been running Gentoo for over a decade now.  :)

I'm not sure if Openoffice distributes official source releases now -
it looks like Gentoo only has a binary package for it.  Libreoffice is
supported in both binary and source on Gentoo - I'm running source
(this is generally the preferred way to do things on Gentoo, but
really big packages often have binary versions for those with slow
CPUs - I think Libreoffice needs something like 6GB of space just to
build).

On Gentoo building Libreoffice basically "just works" - which is a bit
of an accomplishment no doubt after countless bug reports.  The Gentoo
ebuild for Libreoffice is 600 lines long, and about half of that is
the actual build script (most of the rest is the laundry list of
source tarball URLs and dependencies).

One of the nice things about Gentoo is that it makes it easy to tweak
the configuration of packages.  I have Libreoffice built with the
following settings:
     Installed versions:  4.2.3.3-r1(10:36:21 PM 06/04/2014)(branding
cups dbus gtk java kde mysql opengl vba webdav -aqua -bluetooth -debug
-eds -firebird -gnome -gstreamer -gtk3 -jemalloc -odk -postgres
-telepathy -test -vlc ELIBC="-FreeBSD"
LIBREOFFICE_EXTENSIONS="-nlpsolver -scripting-beanshell
-scripting-javascript -wiki-publisher" PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python2_7
-python3_3" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_3")

(any flag listed with a minus sign in front of it is disabled, the
rest are enabled)

Don't ask me why Libreoffice has vlc support.  Maybe you can embed
videos in slides or something.  If you're running Gentoo Prefix on OSX
you'll note it supports aqua as well.  :)

Any of those flags can be tweaked globally or per-package.  If I
decided to install Gnome I could just toggle that flag and my system
would rebuild all the affected packages with Gnome support.  For
kde/gnome there are profiles that set reasonable defaults for
everything, which you can still tweak.  I'm running the
default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop/kde profile.

Rich
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