Comment 35 for bug 267376

GNOME gets an exception from the general procedure because it has a very reliable release schedule that we're in sync with, and so it makes absolute sense to keep up with it. This does not go for OpenOffice.org; until quite recently we could not even have said reliably whether it was going to ship before Ubuntu 8.10, despite originally setting a release date of months ago, and so upgrading to an alpha in intrepid would have been very risky. I appreciate that it is a very important part of the desktop, but that is exactly why we don't want to drop a broken version in at the last minute.

Firefox 3 was unusual because we were going to have to support Ubuntu 8.04 for three years on the desktop, and we knew that Firefox has a history of making it very difficult in practice for us to offer security support for older versions over an extended period of time. This has not historically been a concern for OpenOffice.org, and furthermore Ubuntu 8.10 only needs to be supported for 18 months, so this is much less of a concern.

Furthermore, apparently the scheme that used to be used to produce versioned packages (openoffice.org2-*) has bitrotted for reasons I'm not entirely familiar with, so we couldn't use this to produce parallel-installable openoffice.org3-* packages (which was something I had asked Chris to do). This means that upgrading to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is an all-or-nothing proposition; due to the complexity of the packages involved, rolling it back to 2.4.1 with epoch versions would be very difficult indeed and would probably cause other problems. Far too risky for this stage in our release cycle.

Regarding the comments about release timings in general, I believe that https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases addresses these quite adequately, and at the moment we have no intention of slipping Ubuntu 8.10's release. We would only be prepared to negotiate that for showstopper problems, and while I understand that this is very important to some people it is not a showstopper.

The plan at the moment is to put OpenOffice.org 3.0 into jaunty, and then consider offering it in intrepid-backports if it tests out reasonably well there.