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Thank you LWNThank you LWNPosted Dec 15, 2010 8:11 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151)Parent article: Behind the KOffice split
This is what I pay my subscription for. When I read the fork announcement, I thought: "ok, they got rid of an unreasonable and unsociable maintainer". Thanks to this article my view may be just a little more balanced right now.
They got rid of him to be able to develop without maintaining a proper test suite? To focus on competing with Microsoft Office instead of getting the product ready to use first? Talking about unreasonable...
I still don't know much about the whole thing and considering that there were problems before, Zander might be difficult to work with. But that's far from my original thoughts and I thank LWN and Zonker for showing me his side as well.
Still leaves the question, what the best way forward would look like. For me personally, I would happiliy switch to the fast, nice looking, powerful, userfriendly and power saving koffice/Calligra if it's ODF compatibility (meaning being able to open my OpenOffice.org documents) was a little bit better...
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Thank you LWN Posted Dec 15, 2010 8:44 UTC (Wed) by ingwa (subscriber, #71149) [Link]
Quote: They got rid of him to be able to develop without maintaining a proper test suite? To focus on competing with Microsoft Office instead of getting the product ready to use first? Talking about unreasonable...
This is bullshit!
Some points:
* The drive towards end user readiness was proposed one year before Thomas at the KOffice sprint in Oslo. By me, in fact. At that point Thomas was dead against it, wanting to work on the libraries instead.
* The so called new features that "were in the way of making KWord user ready" were mostly bugfixes. For instance, in one of Calligra / KOffice the keys PageUp and PageDown works, in the other not. I will let you guess which community has implemented this "advanced feature".
* Calligra is not focused on mobile. We want to create an architecture that allows many different user interfaces. One of them is a UI that works for mobile. However, we also maintain the desktop version. If you look into the mailing list of Calligra Suite right now, you will see several usability improvement initiatives that are not done or even wanted in KWord.
* It is true that a lot of effort was put into import filters for MS formats. I fail to see why that isolated effort would impact end user readiness for the applications.
Finally, regarding end user readiness, I think it consists of two parts: lack of bugs and a usable user interface. The text layout a year ago was very bad with lots of bugs. A lot of the effort at that point went into fixing text layout bugs, leaving the KWord maintainer to fix problems in the user interface. In no way did the bugfixes impact any user visible parts of the UI except for improving rendering of document contents. Needless to say, we hardly saw any such UI improvements.
Thank you LWN Posted Dec 15, 2010 9:52 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
What about the alleged breakage or lack of unit tests? Could you please shed some light on that point too?
Thank you LWN Posted Dec 15, 2010 10:17 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] Thomas complained that a long-standing community member who had been helping a summer of code student with the tables feature had not delivered the exact set of unittests he had requested and refused all further contributions from that community member after he joined KO GmbH. Despite being the only free software suite that actually has a set of unittests (with about 25% code coverage) there are problems with the architecture Thomas designed for the text editing feature that make writing unittests in this particular area very hard or even impossible, so it was a convenient tool for him to make people's work impossible. (And there's not just unittests, we have a set of over 3000 documents that are tested after every commit. This set was provided by Nokia, by the way.) As for breaking stuff... Well, I'm sure that happened. Basically, KWord's layout engine is not just very complicated, it's also really brittle and buggy. Basically, unmaintainable spaghetti code, so everyone who touches it breaks stuff, including Thomas. And even if it were great, where work is being done, stuff breaks.
Thank you LWN Posted Dec 16, 2010 15:27 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
> we have a set of over 3000 documents that are tested after every commit
Does LibreOffice also test against that set of documents?
Thank you LWN Posted Dec 20, 2010 19:28 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
> Despite being the only free software suite that actually has a set of unittests
Do you mean the only free software office productivity suite? If so, what are the candidates? OpenOffice, KOffice and .. is there another entrant?
I'm not mocking, I just don't really know what's being implied here. If the statement is essentially "we don't have full coverage and we'd like more, but OpenOffice has none", I find that pretty informative, if somehow personally unsurprising.
Read flatly, it seems to imply that you're the only free software suite of any sort that has unit tests (not sure what comprises a suite.)
Tried Monkey Testing? Posted Dec 29, 2010 16:26 UTC (Wed) by gmatht (guest, #58961) [Link]
I was just wondering if you had tried monkey testing. Dumb monkey tests only find crash/abort type bugs, but that is certainly good start. I wrote a script to perform Monkey tests and related tasks: spamming millions of keypresses, detecting crashes, finding minimal recipes to reproduce the crash, automatically finding the changeset that introduced the crash and so on. At the moment I've mostly used it on LyX (on which is has found about 60 bugs), but I am making it more general, and it has found a bug in abiword.
http://blogs.tucs.org.au/frsi/programme/#mccabe
My goal is to get it so that you can just point it at any project and press go. It is still rather finicky at the moment however.
Thank you LWN Posted Dec 16, 2010 22:25 UTC (Thu) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]
>They got rid of him to be able to develop without maintaining a proper test suite?
A colleague who was at Nokia told me of the horrors of their build system and regression testing process. But that was over 18 months ago and may have improved so that there is some unit testing / integration testing going on. I don't know the facts right now but trust Nokia to meet their duty of care to ensure that they provide high-quality software.
I was also told that Microsoft were being paid by Nokia to develop Office tools on QT for Meego, which causes me to question the 'Office compatibility' part of the story.
Take care.
Thank you LWN Posted Dec 17, 2010 8:40 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
At the moment at Nokia, software has to have a certain % of unittest coverage and no failures to be released. Btw, Microsoft is working on a Qt-based version of their Office for Symbian, not MeeGo. Office for MeeGo is going to be Calligra-based.
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