Does libreoffice-bin REALLY depend on qtbase?

paraw

Hi all, I have an old system, on which I do not want to install any Qt package, and on which I have installed libreoffice-bin. However, it seems that the latest version in portage depends on qtbase. My question is: is this dependency "real", meaning is it actually needed to run the libreoffice components, or is it a mistake in the ebuild? Note that libreoffice (the non-binary version) only depends on the Qt libraries if the kde USE flag is used, so I would have assumed the same to hold for the binary. Any idea/information about it?

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2024 7:16 pm Post subject:

No, in libreoffice the qt package is installed if you enable qt5 or qt6 use flag.
So another user may want only qt and not gtk.
If you install a binary in gentoo you have to compromise with the use flags enabled.
_________________
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Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 22885

To expand on fedeliallalinea's answer, although libreoffice may support being built without Qt[1], if libreoffice-bin was built with a dependency on Qt, then yes, it needs Qt. This is easy enough to test: use emerge --nodeps to force libreoffice-bin to install without satisfying any dependencies. Try to use it. If it does require qt and you do not have qt, then you will get an error trying to open anything that needs qt. As always, when you override the dependency checker, beware that you are assuring Portage that you have handled all the truly required dependencies already. If your assurance is wrong, things may break.

[1]: I have not inspected any of the relevant ebuilds, and am taking on faith OP's claim that setting USE=-kde avoids the qt dependency in libreoffice.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20539

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 22885

The latter: qtbase:6 is hard required, and qtbase:6 satisfies the dependency only if qtbase:6 has both USE=gui and USE=widgets enabled. If the ebuild were conditionally dependent on qtbase:6 as a function of the ebuild's own USE, it would have been written as gui? ( dev-qt/qtbase:6 ) widgets? ( dev-qt/qtbase:6 ).

logrusx · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2018 Posts: 2533

It looks like there are build config options --enable-qt5 and --enable-qt6 which makes it beyond me why libreoffice hard-depends on qt at all.

Also this is the corresponding line of the source based ebuild:

paraw · Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2024 7:17 am Post subject:

OK, so I guess the right thing to do would be asking those who make the binary to provide a qt-free version.

Could you point me to the right procedure to do so, please? In other words, do I file a bug in the Gentoo bugzilla, or do I write an email to someone (and to whom, in this case)?

logrusx · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2018 Posts: 2533

Best way to file a bug.

Best Regards,
Georgi

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2024 8:44 am Post subject:

sam_ · Developer Joined: 14 Aug 2020 Posts: 2043

libreoffice-bin is already on life-support and will go away when Portage has support to opt-in for binpkgs per-package via package.env. Adding variants to the official binhost for libreoffice (which already does have packages for libreoffice) would be doable, but we're not going to add variants for libreoffice-bin.