If not Base will be abandoned is that it?
Is the actual state of this comonent usable at all?
Rogerio
Hi Rogerio,
If not Base will be abandoned is that it?
Is the actual state of this comonent usable at all?
I can't speak for what any of the developers might feel, I know that
some have said they never use Base at all, or rarely, and therefore see
no point in worrying about its bugs, or developing further for it. I
don't know what the Steering Committee, TDF itself or any of the other
guiding instances of the Foundation think either. The fact that there is
a lot of Java stuff in there as the basic underpinning functionality
does not plead in its favour, that is for sure, at least as far as I can
tell from reading the dev lists, and comments I have seen on the dev irc.
At the moment there is no attributed Base specialist
programmer/developer in the LibreOffice project. That is not to say that
someone won't step up to the mark, but the question would then be, when,
and if so, would he/she be able to revive/maintain the module ? The way
things are going at the moment, the headlong rush with which things are
proceeding in other modules will IMHO necessarily lead to more and more
incidents with regard to the Base module.
A case in point is my personal conviction that recent changes to Calc
threw up an unforeseen problem with the Oracle Report Builder extension
which is bundled with LibreOfffice (the chart functionality in
particular). I can not prove my theory, not being a programmer, and it
seems that it is not so easy after all to find out which changes in the
git repo caused things to become that way, but suffice it to say that
the ORB worked fine without interfering with Calc charting in 3.3.2, and
then suddenly started causing problems when 3.4 was in beta. In between,
there was also the code merge from OOo, so of course, there is also the
possibility that things in that merge messed up the inter-relationship
between Calc charting and the ORB.
And finally, is it usable ? Yes, but...
- the connectors (postgres, mysql native) ought to be rebuilt with each
new build (this is what Sun always did). This is currently not the case
because these connectors are not considered core functionality and
therefore not bundled with the extensions or integrated into the general
code of the product ;
- mailmerge is, in the eyes of many "former OOo users" (myself
included), unusable, and the priority to fix it keeps getting pushed
back with each new release ;
- it suffers from various string, date, configuration settings and
formatting issues ;
all of which lead to frustration for the end user. Personally, I am
finding it harder and harder to recommend LibreOffice Base as a
competent module, I tend to fall back to OOo 3.2.1 or, on the Mac, to
NeoOffice, because I can live without the changes introduced into
LibreOffice since its inception. However, I can understand that every
user will have his or her own particular needs.
We desperately need a Base developer - if you happen to know one, it
would be nice if he/she could spare some time to help out the project :-))
Alex