[arch-general] LibreOffice changes: dependencies, 'Fresh' branch & misguiding package names

[Neitsab]

Hi everybody,

During a recent system upgrade I noticed I had a couple of new orphaned
packages, among which libcdr, libetonyek, libmspub, libodfgen, libvisio
and libwps.

A quick investigation directed me to the libreoffice-common package,
which has ceased relying upon them in its 4.2.4-2 version. PKGBUILD's
message is "use internal file format libs because new library releases
from system that depend on librenvenge are not supported by this LibO
stable branch" [1].

Looking for packages that may depend on the orphaned libs made me
discover libreoffice-fresh, the "LibreOffice branch which contains new
features and program enhancements" [2]. LO-fresh does depend on those
newly orphaned libs.

Now this left me wondering: should I switch to using the new
"libreoffice-fresh", or stick to the installed libreoffice-common?

What confuses me is that it seems current Arch-provided
libreoffice-common is already built from upstream "Fresh" branch, as
package version 4.2.5 matches the one announced upstream (release
announcement [3] and current Arch PKGBUILD for libreoffice-common [4]),
and PKGBUILD source URL concurs. It appears "libreoffice-fresh" is
actually a prerelease version for the next minor version release, 4.3 ([5]).

So, AFAICT, currently Arch repos provide two versions of LibreOffice
both built from the "Fresh" upstream branch: one is the stable version
("libreoffice-common" --> v. 4.2.5-1), the other is a prerelease version
("libreoffice-fresh" --> v. 4.3.0-0.9). However, the first one doesn't
depend on formerly needed libs that add import functionalities while the
second one does. So right now at least package names are a bit confusing
(e.g. should be "libreoffice-fresh" and "libreoffice-fresh-prerelease"),
and there is no version built from the "Stable" branch (v. 4.1.6).

Could somebody shed some light about this situation, and is some kind of
announcement planned so that users do not suddenly realize they switched
software branch? I couldn't find any info in May/June arch-general and
arch-dev-public archives.

Regards,
Neitsab


--------------------
[1]
https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/libreoffice&id=8d54d5fa9fb00508e3224268baf14c8a83c9950a

[2] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/libreoffice-fresh/

[3]
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2014/06/20/libreoffice-4-2-5-hits-the-marketplace/

[4]
https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/libreoffice&id=4c65c0c863bf81809c55cf4dbc455614e3c59c83

[5]
https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/libreoffice-fresh