Note to Willy:

I hadn't launched Libre Office Draw in a month or so. Since that time I updated to 6.0.5. Today Draw failed to open. The error was something like:

Running ldd against the library revealed a dependency on libavahi-common.so.3 and libavahi-client.so.3.

There are two LibreOffice packages at slackbuilds.org. One performs a full build and has been updated to note the avahi dependency. The other package (Willy is the maintainer) converts the upstream RPM. The slackbuilds.org web page is not yet updated to reflect the new dependency.

To use Draw from the converted RPM package, be sure to build libdaemon and avahi packages from slackbuilds.org.

Avahi does not need to run from the rc.d scripts. Only the shared libraries need to be installed to run Draw.

Interesting to me is the 6.0.4 version did not have this dependency. I understand if the dependency was introduced in 6.1, but 6.0.5 is supposed to be a bug fix release.

Willy, thanks for the package. I hope this helps you and others.

My own libreoffice-6.0.5 package does not have a dependency on avahi. Period.

1 members found this post helpful.

I likewise build libreoffice without avahi and have found no examples where libreoffice has failed without it.

Thanks for that, Alien. I'll replace my current install from SBO with yours. Why on earth would Draw rely on Avahi anyway? What's so special about Draw that it requires Bonjour support?

Yeah, i was confused when i noticed i failed to open simpress and then later i found the same problem.

My main box (this one) has Avahi installed on it. I recompiled cups to support avahi. Thus my repository has a cups compiled for avahi to override the Slackware cups (slackpkg+). On updating one of my laptops I decided to go with my version of cups. On launching Calc I got a related error.

Of course going back to the Slackware cups fixed the problem.

I use Alien Bob's LibreOffice packages.

The problem is whoever built the rpm package. The slackbuild only converts that package.

I support other distros at work. Packaging is getting sloppy in that area pulling in unnecessary deps.

Avahi/Bonjour is used by LibreOffice Impress for "remote control". Draw and Impress apparently share enough code that this results in Draw depending on Avahi too, even though Draw doesn't need it, if LibreOffice was compiled to use Avahi.

This TDF wiki page says remote control of Impress won't work if "for example the version of LibreOffice was compiled without support for that (like is the case for the Linux builds provided by TDF)". This was true through 5.4.7 and maybe some of 6.0.x, but on 2018-05-19 there was a commit to the source to always enable Avahi on Linux. I didn't find any explanation why this was done, and I think it is a bug.

Since I want to use the TDF builds, and Slackware 14.2 doesn't offer Avahi, I compiled 2 little stub libraries libavahi-client and libavahi-common and installed them into the Libreoffice program directory. That's enough for Draw and Impress to work once again.

Great . . . . .it works