On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 04:41:39AM -0400, Matthew Harrison wrote:
> Why in the world are you using 1.1.3 when 2.2.1 is current? 1.1.3 is
> at least 3 years old. Is Debian providing you with this? I suggest
> downloading 2.2 and enjoying a working OOo install on Linux.
I installed Debian Sarge on my PC about that time. I've only upgraded
one program since then, the one I hack myself.
Upgrading software really isn't fun. Downloading it, unpacking it,
./configure; make; make install, yes, that can take less than an hour.
Or sometimes it hits incompatibility bugs ("can't find iplv6.h"). Then
the fun really starts.
Typically, the new version doesn't find your old config file; it has
"enhanced" the search path, and finds instead the empty file it has
itself placed high up in this path; yes, Debian has done this to me. Or
it has obliterated it with a shiny new version (OK, this is rare). Or it
can't understand it any more, because it now expects it to be in "XML"
(yuck!).
It can't find your existing files (because you haven't configured your
$HOME into it yet). It can't understand your style settings (because the
format has changed). It can't process a file.rtf generated by MS Word
because it no longers tolerates certain buggy constructions. It
automatically tries to convert all your files to ODF unless you do
something to stop it. (Note: I'm not saying this is the case).
It assumes you're running on a 800 x 600 screen (Debian Sarge actually
set up my Window manager like this). Or, just as bad, a 3840 x 2400 one.
Now there's nothing terribly difficult about fixing all these hassles.
It's just that each one takes between half an hour and two hours,
sometimes longer, to diagnose and fix. By the time you've sorted out the
4 to 8 gotchas which come with the typical major upgrade, that's one to
two days of wretchedness. Multiply that by the number of packages you
use, and that's a lot of unhappy time.
So I tend not to upgrade software as such. Unless something is really
badly broken, I don't try to fix it. Being without the help file counts
as broken here. (BTW, would somebody, please, PRETTY PLEASE, tell me the
name of the file I need?) Things get upgraded when I install a new
version of GNU/Linux.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Ittersbach, Germany).
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