Hi Tom, *
The problem with the Base guide is not that people aren't keen. There are at
least 2 people that joined Documentation specifically to work on it rather than
Indeed.
on other guides. The problem seems to be that Base is a bit quirky and keeps
suffering odd regressions. What works and what doesn't is very unpredictable in
each release and even what 'should' work is not always clear.
Unpredictable...is an understatement. Many things that used to work in
OOo 3.2.x, and for which the pre-existing OOo Base documentation was
written, now either no longer work at all, or only partially.
Paradoxically, the built-in help was actually much more detailed in OOo
before the switch to HC2/wiki-help, and since then it has been quite
simply unhelpful. Try carrying out a meaningful search in the Base help
and you will soon find out why, it is enough to drive anyone nuts.
Add to that the new features that were added to OOo during 3.x codebase
development, many of which were either not fully functional (charts in
reports), buggy (SQL parser engine), or quite simply got screwed up when
the LibreOffice project took over (see current Base bug list), and you
have a documenter's nightmare in the making. The bug fixes to Base that
the OOo developers had in their child workspaces whilst Oracle was
pulling the plug on OOo have not been integrated into the LibreOffice
code because there is a lack of clarity as to whether these are indeed
freely available (since by their very nature, they were CWSes by Oracle
employees, not trunk code, and thus not yet approved for submission into
the main source tree).
We need to attract devs to work on Base. At the moment there are none
apparently. Perhaps now that IBM contributed all that code to Apache the
OpenOffice Base might take a large step forwards but again that makes LO's Base
difficult to write for unless we can get that code base into LO too.
The devs would not only need to work on Base to patch it up, but also
provide documentation for the functions that get developed / completed /
corrected.
As for the Apache project, I can't see it being able to produce anything
of that ilk in any short timeframe, as the people there are still trying
to work out which bits of code they are actually allowed to integrate
into their source tree. They are still faced with many licensing issues
about various parts of their project, including how, or whether to, host
the documentation that has accrued over the years within the OOo
project, because a lot of it is under an Apache-incompatible licence.
Things might get sorted out, but it will be later, rather than sooner.
To put it bluntly, Base is currently in some kind of interdimensional
space where it is being left to degenerate as other parts of the code
progress.
Alex