See below as [...] -- Jim
-----Original Message----- From: Alex Thurgood <[email protected]> To: [email protected] 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 -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] 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
