Why are some Open Office packages marked as “local or obsolete” in Synaptic

Question

This is a follow up to this question.

I have not installed Open Office manually. I doubt that Open Office has been dropped from the repositories. So why are Open Office packages marked as "local or obsolete" in Synaptic?

I am using Ubuntu 10.04.

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Update

I highly doubt that the switch to LibreOffice is the cause for the Open Office packages being marked "local or obsolete".

Several reasons:

• There are more than just the Open Office packages which are marked "local or obsolete". For example: python-uno, scim, and xserver-xorg-input-wacom.
• This link explicitly says that ubuntu 10.04 still uses Open Office.
• There are no LibreOffice packages in the Ubuntu 10.04 repositories. As the link above says, one has to use a PPA to get LibreOffice. I am pretty sure Ubuntu will not drop Open Office packages without having replacements in the official repositories.
• Ubuntu 10.04 is a LTS (Long Term Support) version. Canonical is very conservative with upgrades on LTS versions. Ubuntu 10.04 even still uses Firefox 3.6.
• Usually, when they do such updates, there is a transitional package which conflicts with the old packages so they get uninstalled. So happened with the old adobe flash plugin package.

Answer 1

You have some local or PPA build of openoffice.org-* installed. Looking at your screenshot, the version seems to start "1:3.2.1-6ubuntu1~10.". The remainder is not visible. Did you perhaps enable backports at one point, update openoffice.org, and then disable backports? Perhaps the same for some PPA that may have contained openoffice.org at some point?

Regardless of the cause, in order to make this not be marked as "local or obsolete", you need to have a current repository configured containing the version of the software you have installed. The least invasive method is to enable repositories containing the version of the software you are using (although I would expect that you would be upgraded to something based on 1:3.2.1-7ubuntu1 or 1:3.3.0-7ubuntu1 if you are using current backports (whether official or from a PPA)).

The more invasive method would be to run commands of the form apt-get install openoffice.org-gtk=1:3.2.0-7ubuntu4.2 for each of the packages (check the current available version to determine which version number to use in the command). This will probably result in all sorts of error messages until you have performed the operation for each and every package listed, due to the complexity of the dependencies chains in openoffice.org packages. Note that packages are not guaranteed to downgrade safely: while it is exceedingly likely that the packages will perform as expected after downgrade, in the case that there are problems, please update this question with any error messages that appear specifically related to downgrade, the specific versions you have installed, and the versions you see as available in the hopes that those answering can find out what operations cannot be completed.

Answer 2

Ubuntu now ships with LibreOffice as of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwahl) instead of OpenOffice.

Answer 3

Premises:
Ubuntu has switched to LibreOffice suite starting from Natty (11.10). At now LibreOffice is default office application in Ubuntu (OfficeApplications/DefaultPackages).

You can find some backgrounds here.

If you want to keep support from Ubuntu, you should switch to LibreOffice, even because at now it is compatible with OpenOffice file formats (LibreOffice is a derivative of OpenOffice).

Proposal:
Since the link you provided proves OpenOffice is maintained in 10.04, I think you should check:

• That repositories are properly set;
• That openoffice* packages are not from a ppa deactivated/deleted after package installation.

In fact, looking to your screen-shot, it seems newer versions compared to the ones currently in Canonical are installed in your system.

Answer 4

The most likely explanation is the following:

1. You have the proposed repository enabled.
2. Upgrades for the open office packages were uploaded to the proposed repository.
3. You upgraded the open office packages from the proposed repository.
4. The proposed upgrades were rejected, and subsequently removed from the proposed repository.
5. Synaptic can no longer find the open office packages with the corresponding version or newer in any repository, thus they are listed under "local or obsolete".

See this question for more detailed explanation about the meaning of "local or obsolete" in synaptic.

The proposed repository is a repository for, as the name says, proposed updates. If they are approved then the packages are transfered to another "stable" repository and all is good. If they are not approved then they are simply removed from the proposed repository. The transfer and the removal happens silently. There is no notification mechanism (that I know of) which notifies the user of these changes. That means, if you have the proposed repository enabled, you might get "local or obsolete" packages at any time without warning.

Note that is is not recommended to have the proposed repository enabled on a production system. The Proposed repository is meant for package testers only. I did not know this before and had the proposed repository enabled. I have now disabled the proposed repository after learning about it's purpose and the consequences.

There are two methods to "fix" the situation. With "fix" I mean doing something so the packages are no longer listed under "local or obsolete".

1. Wait for the packages to be upgraded again. Hopefully, this time the proposed upgrade will stick. If the proposed upgrade gets rejected again then you are back to square one.
2. Remove the proposed repository and force each package to downgrade to the latest version available in a "stable" repository.

The first method is easy. Just wait. There are two problems with this approach. While waiting, you are using packages which obviously have problems. After all, they were rejected from proposed for a reason. The second problem is: the packages might never get upgraded and you will be waiting forever. This is especially true if the ubuntu version you are using is near the end of its life.

The second method is not as easy and can be quite troublesome, especially if the package has other packages depending on it. Read this answer for an explanation how to downgrade from proposed.