ESC meeting minutes: 2023-02-23

[Patrick Luby]

On 2/23/23 10:34 AM, Miklos Vajna wrote:
>      + langpack install on macOS: 
>        + spotlight is just the messenger here (Cloph)
>          + integrating the langpacks into the installer is problematic
>          + including the help as well would mean it's too large
>          + some regions want offline help
>          + perhaps a compromise: bundle UI translations
>            + would be the same as we do it on Windows

Just wanted to add some data so you can estimate how much bandwidth 
increase a Universal + all languages installer would cause.

Below is the size of the Universal .dmg installer download for 
NeoOffice's non-Mac App Store version on GitHub:

-r--r--r--@ 1 root  wheel  519299873 Nov  6 16:59 
NeoOffice-2022.5_Professional_Edition-Universal.dmg

This includes localizations and local help files for the following 
subset of languages:

ar ca cs da de el en-GB en-US es fi fr he hu it ja ko nb nl pl pt pt-BR 
ro ru sk sv th tr uk zh-CN zh-TW

ossible hacky solution: maybe the language pack installer just needs to 
have the Contents/MacOS/soffice executable included.

I have used small "patch installers" for many years to let users install 
a fix before doing a full release. It is a regular macOS installer that, 
like LibreOffice's language pack installer, unzips a bunch of 
application files in a temporary folder and then copies the files into 
an existing installation.

The one difference in my patch installer is that I include binaries 
(usually a few .dylibs) so I had to also include the soffice executable 
for codesigning to work.

Apparently, macOS won't notice that some of the application's files 
changed because including the executable causes codesigning to create a 
new Contents/_CodeSignature and that folder overwrites the existing 
Contents/_CodeSignature folder. Amazingly, macOS still doesn't complain 
that most of the .dylibs and resource files aren't in the list of 
codesigned files.

I don't know if this is a good solution but maybe it could buy a few 
more years before LibreOffice has to switch to one big installer for 
everybody.

Patrick