[Libreoffice] In need of windows packaging team...

[Markus Stenzel]

Changing the installer will invalidate the digital signature so it also is not an option. I won't sign a third party package with my own cert...

I can only say, the OpenOffice.org(tm) team did it until 3.3. There aren't many releases of the package considering the huge amount of work involved in every upgrade so they MAY chose to do it once for every language. All I do here is ask...

I'm also thinking practically, if neither OpenOffice.org(tm) or LibreOffice(tm) is able or willing to create such a setup, I will evade towards another free text processing package. I'm not a fanboy. :)

The goal is to provide students with a FREE CD with FREE software allowing them to study without worrying for the cost. The goal is not "provide a CD with OO.o" or "provide a CD with LO". In the very end everything will work out for the students.

~ms

-----Original Message-----
From: Tor Lillqvist [mailto:tlillqvist at novell.com] 
Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2011 8:24 PM
To: Markus Stenzel; libreoffice at lists.freedesktop.org
Subject: Re: [Libreoffice] In need of windows packaging team...

I am not on the Windows packaging team (but some of my colleagues are), and I can't reply for them. I think some hairy political issues are involved, my personal opinions below...

I think a problem here is that if the packaging team would agree to provide you with such a German-only build, people using all other languages would have the same right to ask for one too. And such requests would drop in, one after one, for more or less similar reasons as you cite.

Having a multi-lingual installer frees us from building and distributing a complete set of single-language installers, which would take significantly more mirror disk space, longer time to upload and propagate to mirrors, etc.

So probably you will need to find some volunteer (or paid consultant) to do such a build for you...

It might even be relatively simple to manipulate our multi-lingual installer: remove unneeded files from the CAB file and modify the MSI database file accordingly, and this way construct a single-language installer? Somebody with the necessary skills could do just that and not have to actually build LibreOffice. The binaries would be identical to what we ship, which would be a plus.

Or should we have some policy that we do provide such single-language installers, but not to random individuals who ask for them, and not on the web (mirrors), but only on request to bona fide mass re-distributors? Where should we then draw the limit, how many copies does one have to be re-distributing to count as a such? 

--tml