Libre Office pkg confusion?

[feffer]

Running LMDE 64-bit and got LibreOffice a few weeks ago via:

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#apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

All seemed well, but today, I tried update/dist-upgrade and found a ton of updates including the new kernel and new xserver pkgs. OK, that's understandable, but also I saw openoffice.org pkgs wanting upgrades. I thought they had been removed when libre office came in?? Didn't see any libre office updates though so I did

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$ dpkg -l libre*

and it showed libreoffice was UNINSTALLED. That was alarming, so I opened mintMenu and it showed libreoffice present but no openoffice. Indeed I could open and use the libreoffice writer.

I'm confused. If the Libre Office suite is installed (as mintMenu shows) why doesn't "dpkg" see it that way. Is "dpkg" seeing "transitional" openoffice.org stuff? This is not just idle curiosity. I'm reluctant to do a dist-upgrade, if something is twisted up here.

Regards,
feffer

[vincent]

Openoffice in testing/sid are just transitional packages now, and they can be safely removed. I would've thought they would be removed when you installed Libreoffice though.

[mads]

For me, transitional packages were not removed when libreoffice was installed. I had to remove them manually:

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sudo apt-get purge openoffice.org-base* openoffice.org-calc* openoffice.org-common* openoffice.org-draw* openoffice.org-emailmerge* openoffice.org-gnome* openoffice.org-gtk* openoffice.org-impress* openoffice.org-java-common* openoffice.org-math* openoffice.org-style-tango* openoffice.org-writer*

And if Synaptic > Status > Not installed (residual config) shows openoffice.org-core:
sudo apt-get purge openoffice.org-core

Note: Don't run sudo apt-get --purge remove openoffice* command, because it
will also remove aspell, aspell-en and dictionaries-common packages
(spell checking and languages packages used by both OO and LO)

[feffer]

Finally got around to this again, and I'm still worried.

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apt-get purge openoffice.org-base openoffice.org-calc openoffice.org-common openoffice.org-emailmerge openoffice.org-gnome openoffice.org-gtk openoffice.org-impress openoffice.org-java-common  openoffice.org-math openoffice.org-style-tango openoffice.org-writer -s
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-impress libppl7 libwps-0.2-2 libreoffice-math libreoffice-gtk
  libppl-c2 libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-base libreoffice-calc libreoffice-emailmerge libqt3-mt
  libreoffice-java-common libreoffice-filter-binfilter libreoffice-writer
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  openoffice.org-base* openoffice.org-calc* openoffice.org-common* openoffice.org-emailmerge*
  openoffice.org-gnome* openoffice.org-gtk* openoffice.org-impress* openoffice.org-java-common*
  openoffice.org-math* openoffice.org-style-tango* openoffice.org-writer*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 11 to remove and 118 not upgraded.

The test apt-get purge shows it only removes the stuff I want, but now a bunch of libreoffice pkgs are "no longer required" Including ones that seem important like libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-base libreoffice-calc and libreoffice-writer. Is this really OK?

thx,
feffer

[mads]

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The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-impress libppl7 libwps-0.2-2 libreoffice-math libreoffice-gtk
  libppl-c2 libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-base libreoffice-calc libreoffice-emailmerge libqt3-mt
  libreoffice-java-common libreoffice-filter-binfilter libreoffice-writer
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.

This is just information so yes it is safe to run the command I've posted. But it was good that you mentioned
it anyway. This is another issue related to this "not so very clean procedure" of replacing OpenOffice with
LibreOffice. If you open Synaptic and click Status, you'll see that these packages are wrongly listed under
"Installed (auto removable)". What you could do to prevent removing these packages by 'accidentally' running the
'apt-get autoremove' command (and to get rid of the above message), is to remove the "Automatically installed"
flag. You can do this either in Synaptic or in Terminal.

In Synaptic:
Status > Installed (auto removable) > mark all libreoffice packages > then in menu bar click Package > uncheck "Automatically installed"

In Terminal, run:

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sudo apt-mark unmarkauto libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-impress libppl7 libwps-0.2-2 libreoffice-math libreoffice-gtk libppl-c2 libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-base libreoffice-calc libreoffice-emailmerge libqt3-mt libreoffice-java-common libreoffice-filter-binfilter libreoffice-writer

PS! If you want to be on the safe side, run the above command first and then try to remove transitional packages by running:

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sudo apt-get purge openoffice.org-base* openoffice.org-calc* openoffice.org-common* openoffice.org-draw* openoffice.org-emailmerge* openoffice.org-gnome* openoffice.org-gtk* openoffice.org-impress* openoffice.org-java-common* openoffice.org-math* openoffice.org-style-tango* openoffice.org-writer*

Either way, the result is the same.

[feffer]

thx for the info -- especially about the "wrongly marked" autoremove packages. The terminal cmd worked just fine. I've been using apt-get for at least 5 years AND never knew about "apt-mark"

Regards,
feffer

[mads]

thx for the info -- especially about the "wrongly marked" autoremove packages. The terminal cmd worked just fine. I've been using apt-get for at least 5 years AND never knew about "apt-mark"

Regards,
feffer

No problem feffer. I am glad that it is sorted out now. By the way, I had a post about these inconsistencies in the LMDE BREAKAGES thread as well.
And yes "apt-mark" is a good one. I didn't know about it either until this problem came up.