Whenever there's an openoffice update, users have to download a new 100Mb set of packages. This is too much, even for broadband users (like myself). It's 25 minutes on 512kb broadband (a common product in the UK). The openoffice packaging should be modularised, like Xorg's has, so that only selected, targeted updates need to be made. A better solution would be to implement patch RPMs, but the people who decide about this have always refused.
yes, it'd be nice. It's sort of possible to split the build into two parts, the "URE" part and the actual apps, that would help somewhat, and I'm thinking about trying to get that working. At the moment at least with the first level split into multiple packages of writer, impress, draw etc and the crucial langpack split you don't have to download 800megs if you want langpack-bn and an update has occured, unlike in 1.1.X days where all langpacks came in a gigantic "i18n" rpm. I feel the pain, and one step has been taken. I'm considering another for URE/apps. And the final URE/one app/another app/etc is up in the air.
Out of interest, I ran rpm -qa --queryformat "%{SIZE} %{NAME}\n"|sort -rn in order to find out what the largest packages on my FC5 machine are: I think the most surprising thing is how huge Adobe's Reader is. OpenOffice.org core comes in at 3.5 times bigger than any other FC package. Top 10: 213409160 openoffice.org-core 98717039 AdobeReader_enu 64091981 glibc-common 59179927 j2re 55530004 kdebase 55286750 Omni 51933076 festival 51267142 kdepim 46532500 libstdc++-devel 46209085 kdelibs 43073422 qt-devel 42256845 wine