A third of a LibreOffice snap

Take your time, hurry up
The choice is yours, don’t be late
Take a rest as a friend
— Nirvana, Come As You Are

I have just updated the LibreOffice snap package. The size of the package available for download created some confusion. As LibreOffice 5.2 is still in beta, I built and packed it with full debug symbols to allow analysis of possible problems. Comparing this to the size of e.g. the default install from Ubuntu *.deb packages is misleading:

• The Ubuntu default install misses LibreOffice Base and Java unless you explicitly install them
• The Ubuntu default install misses debug symbols unless you install the package libreoffice-dbg too

As many people are just curious about running LibreOffice 5.2 without wanting to debug it right now, I replaced the snap package. The download and install instructions are still the same as noted here — but it is now 287MB instead of 1015MB (and it still contains Base, but no debug symbols).

The package file including full debug symbols — in case you are interested in that — has been renamed to libreoffice-debug.

(Note that if you downloaded the file while I moved files around, you might need to redo your download.)

LibreOffice 5.2.0 beta2 as a snap package

What’s been happening in your world?
What have you been up to?
— Arctic Monkeys, Snap out of it

So — here is what I have been up to:

LibreOffice 5.2.0 beta2 installed as a snap on Ubuntu 16.04

The upcoming LibreOffice 5.2 packaged as a nice new snap package. This:

• is pretty much a vanilla build of LibreOffice 5.2 beta2, using snapcraft, which is making packaging quite easy
• contains all the applications: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, Base
• installs easily on the released current LTS version of Ubuntu: 16.04
• allows you to test and play with the upcoming LibreOffice version to your hearts delight without having to switch to a development version of Ubuntu

So — how can you “test and play with the upcoming LibreOffice version to your hearts delight” with this on Ubuntu 16.04? Like this:

wget http://people.canonical.com/~bjoern/snappy/libreoffice_5.2.0.0.beta2_amd64.snap{,.sha512sum}
sha512sum -c libreoffice_5.2.0.0.beta2_amd64.snap.sha512sum && sudo snap install --devmode libreoffice_5.2.0.0.beta2_amd64.snap
/snap/bin/libreoffice

and there you have a version of LibreOffice 5.2 running — for example, you can prepare yourself for the upcoming LibreOffice Bug Hunting Session. And its even quite easy to remove again:

sudo snap remove libreoffice

This is one of the things that snap packages will make a lot easier: upgrading or  downgrading versions of an application, having multiple installed in parallel and much more. Watch out as there are more exciting news about this coming up!

Update: As this has been asked a few times: Yes, snap packages are available on Ubuntu. No, snap packages are not only available on Ubuntu. This text has more details.

Update 2: The original download included debug symbols and thus was quite big. The download now has 287MB. This post has all the details.