Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Should LibreOffice even support Microsoft secret formats?

On 9/11/2011 2:52 PM, Tom Davies wrote:
> Hi :)
> Yes, but it's very rare for a program to be 100% perfect.  Thigns tend to be reasonably close but 
> just not close enough sometimes.


      Software is subject to a behavioral equivalent to Gödel's theorem 
in mathematics in that it is humanly impossible to prove that software 
has no bugs.  As far as I know, the closest we can come is to have unit 
tests with 100 percent coverage of all the options.  Even that, however, 
is not enough, because there are always ambiguities in the 
documentation, etc., which create opportunities for bugs.


> Of course with proprietary stuff it is usually difficult to get any bugs fixed but with OpenSource 
> it's possible for 'anyone' to fix a bug.


      Anyone can submit a bug report.  I just provided privately 
reproducible examples of two problems to Dennis Hamilton, who requested 
them.  (Thanks, Dennis.  I did not see a place for bug reports on 
libreoffice.org, but I also didn't look too hard.)


      With open source, anyone can download the source code.  Of 
course, reading the code and tracing a bug to its source requires some 
knowledge of how to do that.  In theory, however, anyone can do that and 
offer bug fixes to the core development team.  I've done that with R 
(www.r-project.org) but not LibreOffice, some of which they've accepted 
and some they haven't.


      Spencer

> There are a lot of bug-reports about specific problems with MS formats and the list is getting worked through.  Usually the older formats (without the X at the end, eg doc rather than docx) work better because there has been longer to fix the bugs. 
>
> LibreOffice doesn't completely conform to ODF standards either but it is trying to get closer. 
> Regards from
> Tom :)
>
>
> --- On Sun, 11/9/11, Anthony Papillion<anthony@cryptofreaks.tk>  wrote:
>
> From: Anthony Papillion<anthony@cryptofreaks.tk>
> Subject: RE: [libreoffice-users] Re: Should LibreOffice even support Microsoft secret formats?
> To: "LibreOffice Mailing List"<users@global.libreoffice.org>
> Date: Sunday, 11 September, 2011, 21:41
>
>
> > Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:33:09 +0100
> > From: tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk
> >
> > Hi :)
> > MS don't implement their standard in the way that they wrote they would.  Having set a standard
> > anyone that follows that standard is guaranteed to produce things that are a little wonky when
> > opened in MS Office.  LO devs work at getting LO's implementation as wonky as MS's but the
> > wonkiness is the unknown factor.
> Hi Tom,
>
> Ok, I can accept that. But then, aren't we back to a 'secret format'? If I implement a standard to 
> write out a file a certain way and do it in another way that isn't documented then I'm not 
> following the standard and, thus, my filetype is secret. The only way it's *not* secret is if they 
> file is written to the standard without any deviations.
>
> At first, I thought 'ok, so this means MS has published a standard that other vendors can write to and 
> MS will has implemented that standard (in addition to their secret one) so that MSO can always properly 
> read other vendor created MSO files". But that's not the case. There are times, it seems, when LibO 
> files are improperly rendered in MSO.
>
> So, apparently, the 'standard' really doesn't mean anything because that's not really what 
> Microsoft is doing.
>
> Anthony


--
For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+help@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted