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.