About 1½ weeks ago or so, LibreOffice was released for Squeeze via Debian Backports. Obviously great news given what has been happening to OpenOffice.org after Oracle’s take-over of Sun. However, when I first tried installing it on my Squeeze-powered workstation, it insisted on installing AbiWord and a couple of other packages as well, which I thought was absurd, and I thought it was a bug in the LibreOffice packages.
Today I decided to dig around a little bit on some mailing lists and I figured out that, the problem was caused by the package gnome-office having abiword or openoffice.org as its dependencies. gnome-office is a meta-package that supplies GNOME with an office suite, either AbiWord/Gnumeric or OpenOffice.org, so when trying to remove OpenOffice.org in favor of LibreOffice, this thing thinks I am removing OpenOffice.org for good, as it is not aware of LibreOffice, so after having removed gnome-office, I could smoothly remove OpenOffice.org and install LibreOffice.
As I wanted LibreOffice to be a drop-in replacement for my current OpenOffice.org configuration I executed the following commands:
apt-get remove gnome-office
apt-get remove openoffice.org openoffice.org-base openoffice.org-base-core openoffice.org-calc openoffice.org-common openoffice.org-core openoffice.org-draw openoffice.org-emailmerge openoffice.org-evolution openoffice.org-filter-binfilter openoffice.org-filter-mobiledev openoffice.org-gcj openoffice.org-gnome openoffice.org-gtk openoffice.org-help-en-gb openoffice.org-help-en-us openoffice.org-impress openoffice.org-java-common openoffice.org-l10n-en-gb openoffice.org-math openoffice.org-officebean openoffice.org-report-builder-bin openoffice.org-style-galaxy openoffice.org-style-tango openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-us openoffice.org-writer
apt-get -t squeeze-backports install libreoffice libreoffice-base libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-calc libreoffice-common libreoffice-core libreoffice-draw libreoffice-emailmerge libreoffice-evolution libreoffice-filter-binfilter libreoffice-filter-mobiledev libreoffice-gcj libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-gtk libreoffice-help-en-gb libreoffice-help-en-us libreoffice-impress libreoffice-java-common libreoffice-l10n-en-gb libreoffice-math libreoffice-officebean libreoffice-report-builder-bin libreoffice-style-galaxy libreoffice-style-tango libreoffice-writer
To install the exact equivalents of the OpenOffice.org packages I had previously installed.