Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Installing Libreoffice in Ubuntu

See below as [...]

-- 
Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Thurgood <alex.thurgood@gmail.com>
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Sent: Sun, 11 Oct 2015 2:46
Subject: [libreoffice-users] Re: Installing Libreoffice in Ubuntu

Le 10/10/2015 23:36, Italo Vignoli a écrit :

Suffice it to say that Andreas is a vociferous participant in this
discussion list, but that doesn't make his criticisms any less justified or relevant. What he 
dislikes is badly implemented change for change's sake, and that is an inherent problem in 
LibreOffice's development. The
project from the start has sacrificed behavioural stability with regard to the end user for feature 
creep.

[An example that I encountered in Calc is that recently (between the 4.3.x.x and 4.4.x.x versions I 
think), Fill (on the Edit menu) is no longer accessible via the letter "i" which has been assigned 
to some new functionality that makes Calc warn that a Save is needed. Alt+E, I, R or L or U or D 
has been a long established keyboard shortcut to fill a range Right or Left or Up or Down 
respectively. I'm not completely sure that Ctrl+D still works to fill Down since I have reverted 
from 4.4.5.2 to 4.3.7.2 due in a large part to this behavioral change. New features should not 
preempt existing keyboard shortcuts.]

 We are quite clearly in the "bazaar" mode of the cathedral and bazaar dichotomy, where no 
overlying dictatorship (benevolent or otherwise) exists to govern the direction code development 
should take. This has positive and negative effects -
the positive being that people can just turn up and work on the thing they want to implement - the 
negative being the law of unintended consequences, or collateral damage, i.e. bugs newly introduced 
that change long standing behaviour to which users have become accustomed.

[Such as I described above. I was under the impression that changes are subjected to peer review 
but apparently not.]

Fortunately, there are still people like Andreas to call the code
contributors out on those decisions.

[More of this is needed.]

I would suggest putting yourself in an admin's place where they have probably invested long hours 
in developing a turnkey
OpenOffice/LibreOffice solution for their group of users, then finding one day that that 
longstanding behaviour has changed because someone
else has not thought through a code change due to the tentacular nature of the code base with no 
one having an overarching knowledge of it all,
and you will perhaps understand Andreas' frustration (which I happen to share and have voiced it on 
the mailing lists in the past).

[Stand alone users are also turned off by such off the wall changes.]

[---------->8=====]

... you are stuck playing catch up with versions that successively introduce new bugs or
behaviours that don't get fixed for at least several point releases, or for certain OSes, over 
multiple major version releases. Steve's mention
in this thread of EPS support 

[I don't know this acronym.]

and printing is just yet another
illustration of a change that was made that has a huge impact on
non-Linux OSes - all because someone thought it would be a good idea to make that change without 
providing a solution for all platforms. Video support in Impress is yet another issue that got 
significantly worse with the move to the 4.x branch. What was the message we gave to our
users ? "Suck it up." There is only so much of that that users and their admins are prepared to do, 
and in the end, it won't be surprising if people switch to another product that offers them greater 
longterm stability where such changes are less invasive or devastating to the day-to-day running of 
the organisation.

[Sadly -- Hear. Hear! 

Somebody please listen to what Alex or Italo is saying.] 


Alex

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