On 17/09/2014 00:27, nicholas ferguson wrote:
Sorry, you know the Open Source warranty, don't you? "If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces"?I tossed that investigation aside thinking that that route had been poured over by LibreOffice experts; and took another look.....I didn't understand why I had to clean up this mess, with an open source product that has been on the market, for years....
The reality is that the guy who originally set it up presumably lost interest, and if no-one else has been using it, it bit-rotted. That's a very common occurrence in ALL software, be it Open Source or commercial - indeed, LibreOffice has just been through a massive clean up of bit-rotted code which, iirc, deleted a *third* of the code base!!!
It wouldn't surprise me if this feature dated from the proprietary Star Office days, and obviously got missed in the clean-up. (Which would explain why the original guy lost interest - he would have done it because he was told to, not because he wanted to.)
As they say in the Open Source world, if a feature doesn't work for you, "patches welcome". Sorry you got put to this pain, but it seems obvious the functionality wasn't important to anyone else. But thanks for fixing it for the next person :-)
Cheers, Wol