[libreoffice-users] Bug List - LibreOffice/OpenOffice...

Someone here mentioned that a list really needs to be compiled of all the issues
with LO/OO, in anticipation (eager anticipation, for some of us) of the time
Document Foundation/Openoffice.org get their ship together and fix these
problems. Accordingly, I have broken the ice and begun the process. The vast
bulk of the bugs I have stumbled upon have been in Base, which seems to be the
part of this product that receives the least attention from developers but is,
alas, the part I rely on most heavily. Here is a summary list of the problems I
have encountered... sorted (more or less) chronologically by the order in which
I encountered them.

1) When running the installation LO/OO seems to have a blind spot for
libfreetype.so.6. The file can be right there in /usr/lib and setup won't see
it. I even put symlinks to it in other directories (e.g., /lib) in case setup
was hard-coded to look elsewhere. This causes the GUI setup to error out.
Fortunately, this only affects the core04 file, which you can extract, install
manually, and re-run GUI setup, which then runs successfully. Priority: 8 of 10.
The *installation* can't complete because it can't see a file that exists? If
the coding is that sloppy for the *setup* program, what's it going to be like
for a program of the complexity of an office suite? Bad joss, horrible first
impression, and I've seen this problem in at least THREE versions, back to back,
meaning new versions are being shipped with old issues unaddressed. Quite
possibly the worst possible relations to your clientele. High priority. Fix
this.

2) When GUI setup errors out, it doesn't clean up after itself on exit, it just
delivers the error message and quits... leaving a partially installed, but still
unusable, program littering up your system. If you can't successfully install,
back out and clean up after yourself. When a failed setup exits, there should be
no evidence left behind that it was ever run (saving log entries about the setup
execution, failure, and cleanup). Don't leave bits and pieces strewn about,
carelessly; it's sloppy. Priority: 5 of 10. It's a little aesthetic, and the
packages can be manually removed... but they shouldn't HAVE to be removed
manually. Setup programs shouldn't be slobs in my system. They should clean up
after themselves. I've done some minor programming, myself (batch files in DOS
and Windoze, shell scripts in Linux, etc.), and I ALWAYS cleaned up after myself
(environment variables, temp files, etc.) - that's just proper programming
procedure.

3) Office (Base) crashes when trying to anchor a form field to a frame, entering
an infinite loop of recovery, crash, recovery, crash. The only way to break out
of the loop is to cancel the recovery process. This wasn't a huge problem for
me, because I didn't have any text in the frame, so anchoring to the paragraph
was functionally equivalent to anchoring to the frame, but it would be a problem
if I had text in the frame. Also, it's sloppy. Priority: 7 of 10. Incidentally,
this works in OpenOffice 3.2.1.

4) Office (Base) occasionally "forgets" field formatting in tables. I applied a
DD/MM/YYYY format to a date field and was later surprised to find Office had
reset that field back to the default of DD/MM/YY. It's an intermittent problem,
and I haven't yet found any rhyme or reason to what triggers it. Office also
dropped some of my user-defined formats (phone number - adding parentheses and
hyphen - and zip code - accounting for zip+4 and adding the hyphen), forcing me
to re-create those formats... several times. Priority: 6 of 10. It SEEMS to
remember formatting applied to forms, but I'd rather apply to tables for
consistency across forms, reports, etc.

5) Office (Base) won't save some default field values in tables. If you "Save
as..." it drops both the default value and all fields after the field with the
default value assigned. See this bug report:
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.documentfoundation.libreoffice.user/3347
for details. Priority 10 of 10. Without the ability to include default values in
foreign key fields, Base is, for all practical purposes, unusable. This MUST be
fixed in order for LO/OO to be a viable product. Incidentally, this works in
OpenOffice 3.2.1.

It is my hope that others will add to this list (though not TOO many items!) and
the appropriate developers will fix the problems in this list. LO/OO is too
important a product to languish in its current quagmire of mediocrity. When
issues important to users have been addressed, this product could become a
powerhouse of an opensource alternative to the Microsoft Money-Making Machine. I
intent to keep this post in its original form (a standard text document) and I
will add other issues that I come upon, as I come upon them (or they are brought
to my attention. That way, there will be a single repository of all the bugs
that need to be addressed.

Until then, keep the opensourece faith and may the wind(ows) be always in your
past!

Fair day and be well,
Chris


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