LibreOffice Packaging

Sources

• LibreOffice sources are at: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/

• LibreOffice packaging repository (shared with debian) at: https://salsa.debian.org/libreoffice-team/libreoffice/libreoffice

Workflow

The following workflow has established itself as usefull from LibreOffice 3.5 onwards:

• At the start of the cycle, we base directly on the vanilla debian packaging, rebasing the delta of Ubuntu against Debian as clean patches on top of Debian
• This patch queue will be rebased regularly on Debians changes
• somewhere between alpha and beta the rebasing stops (longer patch queues get fragile) and we switch to merging from Debian
• around beta2 we stop merging and instead cherry-pick relevant patches from Debians branch to stabilize the release
• in the end we make a clean patch queue on top of debian out of this again and rebase that for the next release

Backporting

To backport a package to an earlier release, you need to:

• Download the source package you want to backport (*.dsc file and all the files referenced in it: *.orig.tar.xz *.debian.tar.gz)

• unpack the source with

  dpkg-source -x *.dsc

• change to the build dir:

  cd libreoffice-*

• adapt package for the backport (magic happens here)

• recreate the debian control file for this release with:

  ./debian/rules control -W ./debian/control.in

• build it:

  dpkg-buildpackage

Adjustments need to be done on the ./debian/rules file mostly as that generates ./debian control too. The should trigger on the distro-release, like e.g.:

• http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-openoffice/libreoffice.git;a=blob;f=rules;h=8c48e4be6e7008c9e79534753dc1ab95a28d6853;hb=refs/heads/ubuntu-raring-4.0#l514

Once the package has been successfully backported, it might be uploaded to the LibreOffice ppa, with a clean dpkg-buildpackage -S and dput ppa:... *.changes.

PPAs

• main ppa this is where:

  • release candidates, that are assumed to be final (usually rc2) of microreleases which will be SRUed/MREed be uploaded first (usually ~1 week before upstream final, ~2 weeks before SRU)
  • backports of the latest majors are available

• libreoffice-5-4, libreoffice-6-0 and libreoffice-6-1 -- per major release copies from the main ppa for those who what all minor updates, but no major update

• https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/libreoffice-prereleases for upstream alpha/beta releases. Only for testing.