Latest LibreOffice daily builds integrate automatic updater

Jun 22, 2017 13:45 GMT  ·  By

LibreOffice developer Markus Mohrhard recently announced that his work on the new automatic updater for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.0 office suite for Linux is finally ready to see the light of day.

In his latest blog announcement, the developer reveals the fact that he's been working on the LibreOffice automatic updater for the past year, finally bringing the same feature that macOS and Windows users have enjoyed for so long to GNU/Linux distributions.

Currently implemented in the latest 64-bit daily builds of the LibreOffice 6.0 office suite and created on a machine running the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12.2 operating system, the new automatic updater uses delta updates to update the application to the latest version available on LibreOffice's servers.

"I’m finally ready to announce LibreOffice daily builds for Linux that integrate our new automatic updater," says Markus Mohrhard. "The work on the automatic updater has been going on for nearly a year now and is finally in a shape that we produce builds on TDF hardware that will automatically update using delta updates."

The automatic updater won't work on local LibreOffice installations

And now for the bad news - as some of you might have already guessed, the automatic updater won't work on local LibreOffice installations. It works only on those builds that you download from the official LibreOffice website, extract the archive, and run the office suite via the binaries outputted in the extracted folder.

Unfortunately, Linux-based operating systems are built in such a way as to not allow third-party developers access the files installed on your computer, for security reasons, of course. That's why you'll probably still have to rely on the repositories of your favorite OS to update the apps you use daily for a long time now.

But there's nothing to worry about because most popular distros update the applications they support on their repositories on a regular basis, so you'll always receive the latest LibreOffice version when it's out. If you want to try out the automatic updater, go ahead and download the latest LibreOffice 6.0 daily builds, but please note that these are of Alpha quality for now.