lubuntu-qa team mailing list archive

[meets@xxxxxx]

On Mon, 2 Feb 2015 16:47:50 +0000
Ian Bruntlett <ian.bruntlett@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 2 February 2015 at 16:24, Saqman2060 <saqman2060@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > That is an interesting concept Ian. Could you elaborate why you feel
> > meta-packages would be a good idea?

> In a word. Convenience :)
> 
> If you only deal with one computer, it's easy to make sure you have all the
> right packages installed. However, if you are working on more than one
> computer - e.g. looking after friend's computers or working on test
> computer(s), being able to install a preferred bunch of packages with a
> single install is very useful.
> 
> If you are dealing with a computer that only has a CD-ROM drive to install
> the O.S. from, the people creating the CD image start running out of space
> on the disc. You can sidestep that by defining a  meta-package to install
> LibreOffice and other big packages. The meta-package is much smaller than
> the package it refers to, meaning that the O.S. iso will fit on a CD-R. The
> only disadvantage is that installation of the O.S. is a two stage process -
> first install from CD-R then install the appropriate meta-package.

Hi,

In Bento, codename for an Ubuntu Openbox Remix (not official), Libreffice (full) is
provided by default. Why? Because from my own experience, Abiword had me loose some work
several times/several versions in the paste years. How? By having files saved under the
Abiword default extension *.abw. The files, some months/years later was/were impossible to
recover, just corrupted and good for the trash bin ! 

The only way I could avoid that, after several methods turning round and round the issue,
was to open one of the versions of my work saved under the .doc extension and open it
with OpenOffice.org or Libreoffice. Unfortunately, all files created with Abiword were
not saved under other extension names, and some were really lost. 

So, if we are to provide a Linux distribution with a text processor which is unreliable,
I prefer to remove some other applications and provide the full Libreoffice suite. I have
also noticed it is possible to make it a little smaller on the hard drive, by installing
only the modules for Write and for Calc. Then the difference is very slight, but when you
remove Gnumeric and Abiword, there are a few depends from the Gnome world which are also
avoided. 

At last, there is one alternate way to deal with the issue of size : provide a
libreoffice-installer script, as Slitaz or PCLinuxOS does it. You could even have it
choose the default language when launching it.

However, Abiword is now the version number 3.0.1, also provided in Vivid, and maybe it
does not suffer anymore from the paste issues leading to have corrupted files? It would
deserve a check in the lists of bug fixes at http://abisource.com/ and some extensive
tests. (Which I won't do, my todo list being full for the time being).

Best regards,
Mélodie

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