On Jan 25, 2015, at 12:30 PM, CVAlkan <foberle@enteract.com> wrote:
Hi Spenser:
What you're saying is certainly true, but in this case it really
didn't sound like it was "pro-Microsoft" but rather "anti-LO" - a
subtle difference perhaps, but I believe a significant one.
The real danger, I suspect, is that, knowing we're gaining on the
proprietary world, we tend to automatically discount some of the
comments that are put out assuming they are "sour grapes" or
marketing misinformation. In particular, however, the one
responder's comment: "contains lot of regression errors in the most
simple things" (I'm assuming the writer means "basic" as opposed to
"simple") is really not that difficult to justify over the course
of the 4.x releases, and not recognizing that will not result in
the continued progress I think we all want. Even realizing that the
4.x series represents a major step forward in lots of ways, there
are quite a surprising number of things that seem to have been
"broken" along the path to cleaning and enhancing the code.
I realize that "quite a surprising number of things" is a little
vague, so I'll mention that one piddly insignificant user alone who
isn't in any way involved in development or testing (that would be
me) has filed several bugs that can be looked up: e.g. 74056,
86578, 88208, and all of these were for things that I recall
successfully using in the past. And it isn't hard to locate other
new bugs related to indexing, printing, table formatting and so
forth that others have filed. Whether these bugs were introduced
due to over-enthusiastic coding, "cowboy coding" (as we used to
call it, a flawed integration process, lack of testing, lack of
code reviews, and so forth is, of course, not for me to say. And,
I'm using the phrase "lack of testing" to include an amateurish
reliance on simple "does it work?" testing as opposed to doing
"real" testing, which can be summed up as "does everything else
still work?" (that's why good testers are a phenomenally underrated
bunch!)
I suspect that's one of the difficulties inherent in this sort of
development environment: the work is more or less voluntary;
developing code is fun and results in creative satisfaction
(positive feedback); rigorous testing for most is not (the best
result is neutral and often seems or is viewed as unproductive).
One other thing to realize is that the comments I pointed to seem
to be specific to Writer, which is where the current threat to the
proprietary world lies (so far as I can tell, Calc has already
reached sufficient parity with Excel for most typical users) and
where the naysayers you refer to are taking their current stand.
But, sadly, other modules (particularly Impress) suffer from too
much attention to cool new features (some of which are admittedly
nice), and insufficient attention to serious flaws in fundamental
functionality, like remaining on the same slide when you switch
views, handling of tables, and so forth.
I'll reiterate the purpose of my post, though: I just thought folks
should be aware of these sorts of postings, since only LibreOffice
users (and not potential ones) are likely to be on this particular
forum (hence - we're preaching to the choir as they say). If a
major multiple operating system forum has this sort of posting that
goes unchallenged, that's another matter entirely; my thought was
that even a public offer of help - specific questions and so forth
- would be a positive counter-balance.
Frank
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