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flathub / org.gnome.Documents

https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.Documents
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Cannot Open LibreOffice Documents #11

Open Saroufim opened 5 years ago

Saroufim commented 5 years ago

When both GNOME Documents and LibreOffice are installed through Flathub, all office file extensions do not open. Documents can only open PDF and remote files.

nedrichards commented 5 years ago

That sounds like an issue for upstream, they're probably not searching for the flatpak version.

BrainBlasted commented 5 years ago

I keep track here, just haven't responded yet. The main issue is that the LibreOffice viewer requires LibreOffice Kit. From what I can tell, installing LibreOffice Kit requires building LibreOffice into the Documents flatpak.

BrainBlasted commented 5 years ago

I asked in the #libreoffice-dev IRC and that fear was confirmed:

hi; not a LoK expert, but anyway, the kit is just an interface to manipulate LibreOffice, so you'd need LibreOffice to work

I guess the only option is to hide LibreOffice docs in flatpak, which makes Documents significantly less useful (and blocks Documents from getting libreoffice-based editing in the future)

Saroufim commented 5 years ago

Is it not possible to somehow make use of the already existing libreoffice flatpak? What if Gnome-documents is installed as a subpackage of LibreOffice itself?

BrainBlasted commented 5 years ago

There's two options:

  1. A LibreOffice extension is created that ships LibreOffice and thus LibreOffice Kit

This doesn't make much sense to me, because we'd be shipping an entire separate app suite for one app potentially. I don't know of any other apps that use LOK. This would be de-duplicated probably if LibreOffice was installed via flatpak, but otherwise it would be a waste, imo.

  1. Bundle LibreOffice with the Documents manifest.

This one will be hard to test for me if we only do it for the flathub, but if we add this to the upstream manifest I will no longer be able to develop Documents with flatpak, as I won't be able to build it locally. Flatpak is a huge help developing this, so I'm not ready to give that up just yet.

In addition, this option means that we're also still wasting space.

Saroufim commented 5 years ago

Option two seems to have dire consequences that are best avoided. On the other hand, I would think that most people who would install gnome-documents via flatpak have already installed LibreOffice via the same mechanism as well or else they would have installed it through the system. Most GNOME-based distributions come pre-installed with gnome-documents and hence anyone installing this via flathub has intended to do so for the sake of having a fully flatpaked system. Even on a system with traditional packages, choosing not to install LibreOffice the same way as gnome-documents has the same consequences.

Additionally, without the ability to open office documents, gnome-documents would be a lot less useful. Given the available choices, I would say having a the option to make gnome-documents fully operational is better than not having the option, no matter how less than ideal the method is.