Hi,
in the Manjaro rolling release model, a fat update is delivered to the “stable” channel about every month. In addition to that, some small updates (often to individual packages) are shipped in between the fat updates. I understand this happens for urgent bugfixes, including fixes for security issues.
These smaller asynchronous updates, seem also to happen for the two main browsers (Firefox and Chromium), though. I can only guess that the rationale has multiple levels: first, browsers are very security-critical pieces of software that are best kept very much up to date; secondly, it can be important to stay on a very recent browser version to avoid sites being broken; finally, updating the browser won’t affect the stability of the distro as a whole.
Now, I wonder if a similar policy could be considered also for Libreoffice fresh. On one hand, not keeping up with the latest version often keeps users facing nasty bugs for long periods of time. For instance, LibO 25.8.1 currently shipped with manjaro stable has a very nasty bug wrt to the default location where documents are exported to PDF that got fixed in 25.8.2. Currently LibO is at 25.8.3 and 25.8.1 is 2 month and a half old. On the other hand, the document suite comes “at the end of the dependency chain”. Upgrading it has no risk of affecting the rest of the distribution.
In order to preemptively address two possible remarks about the above, I would like to note that:
- Yes, I know that switching to the testing channel would give me a newer and more shiny LibO. It could also reduce the stability of my distro as a whole, though (and going back from testing to stable can at times be complex if the newer packages have updated their config files in ways that the older versions do not understand). The situation here is really somehow similar to that of browsers: you can get a recent one, without sacrificing the possibility to stay on stable.
- I also know that in the aur you find packages for the most recent LibO as shipped in binary form by the Document Foundation. While this is very nice, the Document Foundation binaries are built on a very conservative Red-Hat derived distro. It is unfortunate that this results in a very buggy experience on plasma since the newer KF6 VCL does not get built in that environment.
Thanks for looking at this!
