Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Re: Recruitment for Base (Was Re: [steering-discuss] Base - a new mailing list?)

Hi :)
There is an alternative.  Kexi

It's the KOffice / Calligra equivalent of Base but it is in better shape than Base.  

It already has a fairly strong community of devs.  It is already free of Java and uses a few tiny 
Qt components instead.  Qt is cross-platform too but apparently it's much easier to write.  It 
supports a number of back-ends in the same way as Base so we wouldn't be taking a step backwards.  

The original KOffice forked to form Calligra because they reached a point where the code needed to 
be taken in one direction or another.  Forking allowed them to go both routes.  All their database 
devs went to Calligra and changed the name of their database program to Kexi.  

I agree that we need a database [rpgram in LibreOffice but i am not completely stuck on it being 
Base.  I think we need to make a decision asap
Regards from
Tom :)


--- On Wed, 14/9/11, Alexander Thurgood <alex.thurgood@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Alexander Thurgood <alex.thurgood@gmail.com>
Subject: [libreoffice-marketing] Re: Recruitment for Base (Was Re: [steering-discuss] Base - a new 
mailing list?)
To: marketing@global.libreoffice.org
Date: Wednesday, 14 September, 2011, 7:05

Le 14/09/11 03:39, webmaster for Kracked Press Productions a écrit :

Hi all,

> If we had more documentation for and people who really knows Base, it
> would be easier to "sell" LO to some businesses.  I know a user that I
> had to add Office 2003 to his system since that was a deal breaker.  He
> has all of the books and modeling work in data base formats and cannot
> "live" without Access.  He created those DBs with MSO 97 and did not
> upgrade to MSO 2003 until he switched computers and could not find the
> install CD for '97.  So unless LO can easily use Access files and
> reports and forms he created over the years, he will not go to LO, even
> thought he likes the idea behind LO and FOSS.
>
> So we really need to get more people to learn Base and ways for other to
> easily learn how to use it.

Writing documentation for Base is a pointless exercise for as long as
the bugs which hinder the user from actually getting anywhere are not
fixed. Currently it is like trying to sell a new car to someone where,
once you get going, the motor drops out after 5 minutes.

OK, so it is an exaggerated analogy, but realistically that is how it is
today with Base (and it is not a new phenomenon, it has just got
significantly worse since OOo released the 3.4-dev codebase and
LibreOffice started).

It is a chicken and egg situation : people don't want to use it or write
documentation for it, because it doesn't work "as designed". Developers
do not want to fix something that people do not want to use, especially
when :

- the effort just to get into the codebase is huge ;
- you have to know quite a lot about databases ;
- you have to know a substantial amount about Java programming ;
- you have to understand UNO, and how the C++ code within LibreOffice is
bound to the Java functionality that Sun added on and made interdependent.

Not bad for a job description, huh ?

Good luck finding someone prepared to take that on :-))


Alex


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