Many of us are wondering why can’t we get OpenOffice.org 3 from the Ubuntu repos, other than from a PPA for Intrepid users, and I came across an article from Techtonic that has an answer for us. Techtonic’s Alastair spoke with Colin Watson from Canonical and finally found out why we’re having to use alternate sources for the packages.
We’d originally been hoping to include OpenOffice.org 3.0 in Ubuntu 8.10. Our original plan had been to provide packages that could be installed alongside 2.4.1 (rather than replacing it) once 3.0 reached the late beta or release candidate stage. However, a couple of factors made this much harder than we originally expected.
You can get the whole story in Ubuntu explains OpenOffice.org 3.0 decision.
23 October 2008 at 4:36 pm
2 words. Shared libraries. Not being able to install the latest version (stable or not) of any particular program is one of the greatest roadblocks to Ubuntu, or any Linux distro, gaining popular acceptance.