Comments on: Looking at an SPI Project: OpenOffice.org

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:21:54 +0000

A related discussion popped up in LWN's snippets today: Why OpenOffice.org Failed - and What to Do About It (ComputerWorld UK). AH, I don't see what the Debian/Ubuntu split has to do with ease of contribution. They're both fiddly, in different ways. I also don't like Collab.net stuff much: is that the problem at OOo? Ambrose, broadly agree with those points. And I've a rant about Sourceforge.net's sins written, but it needs some tweaks before I post it, so it will be at least a week, probably more.

By: AH

AH — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:36:41 +0000

Go-OO is kind of a fork, in a sort of Debian/Ubuntu way I guess. It is supposed to be much easier to contribute to.

I’ve reported bugs to OOo a number of times, and not a huge amount appears to happen. I’m faintly allergic to all the ‘Collab.net’ stuff they’re using, and trying to follow the build notes is virtually impossible as an outsider.

By: Ambrose

Ambrose — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:14:57 +0000

I don’t think the forking from bugzilla is any issue or impediment to contribution; there was (and still is) sourceforge, which uses something that is not bugzilla which was even harder to use than OOo’s Issue Tracker. Yet sourceforge hosts some of the most active open-source projects.

Yes, Mozilla was quite bad too (I don’t know whether it still is), but as its own thing it generally works. OOo doesn’t even work very well as its own thing =(

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:54:56 +0000

Drew, I saw go-oo this week and I’m not sure how they relate, or the relative merits of the two groups. That was something else that confused me a little.

Ambrose, I meant forking Issue Tracker from bugzilla. I agree about the disappointment about Encapsulated PostScript support. Sadly, OO.org isn’t the only multi-platform software which seems to forget Unix/GNU/Linux support a bit sometimes: Mozilla installations, anyone?

By: Drew

Drew — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:44:25 +0000

From reading the Debian user list I gather we’re actually using go-oo (go-oo.org) instead of vanilla OOo in Debian. I’m not sure if they’re any friendlier to developers, but it might be worth looking into.

By: Ambrose

Ambrose — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:44:02 +0000

What forking? There are bugs I reported harking back from OOo 1.0 days (maybe even 0.x days, but in any case long before the forking days) that are still unfixed, but are essential for compatibility. Maybe the recent forking can force them to actually address these bugs.

The most puzzling thing about OOo is the lack of EPS support. Is OOo truly open source and have its roots in Unix? It is really hard to believe that EPS, once the ONLY way to do scalable graphics interchangeably (at least as an import/export format) in open-source Unix software, is still not properly supported by OOo. You can’t believe the attitude they have when I reported back then that EPS was not working; it was as if they have never used LaTeX and tgif before, nor have they ever used Microsoft Word or PageMaker, nor have they even read the EPS documentation.

OOo doesn’t really work properly whether you view it as its own thing or a Microsoft Office alternative, and their way (speed, or maybe priority) of fixing bugs makes any kind of contribution look like a very frustrating exercise in futility; I won’t be surprised at all that people don’t want to join to contribute anything.

By: Rémi

Rémi — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:33:44 +0000

Reading http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/Join, it seem that they are just saying that joining is only useful if you want to help Oo.o, but not if you only want to use it. They probably want to protect themselves from having lot of user to join when they don’t want to contribute.

By: MJ Ray

MJ Ray — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:19:52 +0000

As alternatives, I tend to use groff (for document layout) and Emacs’s ses-mode (for spreadsheets), but I started back when Wordstar seemed sophisticated, so I don’t mind the dot codes and the need to click “MSPreview” to see it laid out. Most users do want a WYSIWYG office suite, so I recognise its significance though.

I don’t have a ready alternative for the presentation software (is that impress?) although I have used a web browser in the past. My presentations tend to be simple graphics these days, so as long as there’s no outrageous bug, I’m OK with OpenOffice.org.

I’m disappointed but not surprised that bugs in the bug tracker are slow to fix. That’s the danger of forking, isn’t it?

By: Ambrose

Ambrose — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 08:14:59 +0000

I just about gave up reporting bugs in OpenOffice.org, because they never get fixed even if they are very serious from a compatibility standpoint. Among the bugs I reported that didn’t get fixed, the most ridiculous one would have to be a bug in the bug reporting system itself (which, for obviously reasons, need to be a high priority item); it took them, iirc, a whole year to even get to my report (without a fix).

That said, I use it every day out, but it’s rather just out of a lack of alternatives.