LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 1, 2024 2:43 UTC (Thu) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222)
Parent article: LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

So, we can now have a brand new 2024 Office Suite!

This does seem to be a great way to mark versions of software.....

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LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 1, 2024 4:17 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (13 responses)

Not new, Ubuntu has been doing it since 2004. But yes, makes complete sense.

When was Apache OpenOffice 4.1.11 released? No idea. When was RHEL 8 released? No idea. When was Ubuntu 6.06 released? In June 2006. And presumably LibreOffice 24.02 means released in February 2024 though the announcement is from a day earlier.

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 1, 2024 18:43 UTC (Thu) by LightDot (guest, #73140) [Link] (7 responses)

> When was Apache OpenOffice 4.1.11 released? No idea. When was RHEL 8 released? No idea. When was Ubuntu 6.06 released? In June 2006.

I honestly think that the Ubuntu's version 6.06 means a June 2006 release just to someone who is either:

- familiar with this nomenclature beforehand
- knows the current version is 24.01 or some such, and by associating this with the current year, also makes the 6.06 association to 2006.

If someone just sees 6.06 today without knowing the current version (or much else about Ubuntu), the association to the year 2006 won't be there. It might as well mean 6.06 coming just after 6.05 and before 6.07, all released in 1999.

In lieu of this, LibreOffice 24.2 is just as bad. It makes sense at this time and to us, who know what it's about. As soon as it's taken out of the wider context, it loses meaning.

If associating versions to the dates is the goal, simply going with 2006.06 or 2024.2 would be far better.

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 1, 2024 20:28 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (6 responses)

I think the version should be the UNIX timestamp of the corresponding commit. I welcome you all to LibreOffice 1706819361

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 2, 2024 17:09 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

You made me think of ISO date - LibreOffice 20240202 :-)

Cheers,
Wol

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 2, 2024 19:07 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (4 responses)

Per ISO 8601 that should be 2024-02-02! ;)

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 2, 2024 21:59 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

Just looked up the ISO (obviously can't get the real text), but apparently leaving out the hyphens is perfectly okay ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 2, 2024 23:01 UTC (Fri) by atnot (guest, #124910) [Link] (2 responses)

It's a bit confusing because there's actually two standards. There's the ISO 8601 which defines a huge set of different datetime representations. With or without hyphens, with or without T, two or four digit years, some weird things like ordinal dates, etc. This makes it sort of uselessly vague and since the text isn't publically available, nobody-ish actually adheres to it even if they claim to. Instead what people usually mean when they refer to ISO datetime format is RFC 3339 datetime format, which is just the ISO standard but publically available and with all of the superfluous design-by-committee stuff removed. Since it is the actually useful standard, it's what everything actually uses.

And that one mandates hyphens ;)

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 3, 2024 8:37 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

From what I can make out from the summary I read (by someone who's name I recognise, so I trust it), the gist of the standard is you start with the most significant digit (currently 2 for the second millenium) and mustn't leave anything out. Apart from year, everything is two-digit.

So 20240 is actually valid, and unambiguously means any time this year before 1st Nov. Plus the standard delimiters are - and :, if you want UTC you should put T between the date and time, and if there's no indication you assume local time. (You can use Z instead of T, but technically that means the obsolete GMT, which is not quite the same as UTC.)

So it's pretty sensible.

Cheers,
Wol

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 3, 2024 16:46 UTC (Sat) by smcv (subscriber, #53363) [Link]

The T and the Z in RFC3339 aren't at the same position in the date/time string, so I think there's some misunderstanding here about their roles, either in the summary you've read or in your interpretation of it.

The example given in RFC3339 is "1985-04-12T23:20:50.52Z", where T is a separator between date and time (nothing to do with time zones, just another separator like : and -), and Z is a shorthand for +00:00, denoting no offset from UTC (and it's UTC not GMT, at least according to the RFC text).

My understanding of ISO 8601 is that its way to write "12th April 1985 at 23:20:50.52 in a time zone I am not specifying here" is to remove the time zone designator entirely, like "1985-04-12T23:20:50.52". RFC3339 specifically doesn't allow an unspecified time zone, though.

The Z is borrowed from an older military standard where times are suffixed with a single letter representing the time zone (spoken using the NATO phonetic alphabet, hence "Zulu time" for UTC), but in RFC3339 the only time zone where this shorthand is allowed is Z, and all the others need to be spelled out as +05:00 or similar (so in particular T is not a valid timezone suffix in RFC3339). As far as I know, the same is true for ISO 8601.

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 1, 2024 20:30 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (4 responses)

Why would you care _when_ specific version was released? It conveys no information if the version is latest, is it still supported and so on.

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 1, 2024 22:04 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

It's pretty helpful. If you use years for the major version, then you'd immediately know that installing 15.05 in 2024 is probably not the greatest idea.

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 2, 2024 15:41 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] (1 responses)

Or "huh, it says I'm running the 2024 version, but it's 2030. I wonder if there's a new version I should be updating?"

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 3, 2024 9:26 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Well, that depends…is the "Libre" or "Open" in the name?

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 2, 2024 16:44 UTC (Fri) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

What numbering scheme would convey what is the latest version?
<cw>
..., -3, -2, -1, 0.
And when a new release is made, all existing version numbers are decremented, and the new releases becomes version 0 again ;-)
</cw>

LibreOffice 24.2 Community released

Posted Feb 1, 2024 14:12 UTC (Thu) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

For end-user software that has no useful notion of backward or forward compatibility, date-based versioning is indeed a great model.