LWN: Comments on "Behind the KOffice split"

Tried Monkey Testing?

gmatht — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 16:26:29 +0000

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
http://dansted.co.cc/Mon-Keytest.html
https://github.com/gmatht/Jankey

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

k8to — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:28:12 +0000

> 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.)

Thank you LWN

halla — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:40:35 +0000

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.

Thank you LWN

k3ninho — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 22:25:02 +0000

>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.
K3n.

Thank you LWN

cesarb — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:27:01 +0000

> we have a set of over 3000 documents that are tested after every commit

Does LibreOffice also test against that set of documents?

Kalligra?

armijn — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 12:14:15 +0000

No. KDE developers are phasing out the excessive use of 'K' :-P

Kalligra?

hingo — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 23:10:56 +0000

Surely this is a typo and the real name of the fork is Kalligra? Yes?

Behind the KOffice split

ThinkRob — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:07:39 +0000

I think most people are missing the point here. For KHTML, the code was copied from the KDE repository by Apple and then developed away from the community for a long time until it was released as a big code dump with so many changes that it was basically impossible to merge back into the main branch.

Indeed. After the community complained, however, Apple opened their repositories, and eventually produced the open-source WebKit engine -- a project which Apple still sponsors (and employs the lead developer(s)) to this day.

Behind the KOffice split

ingwa — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:50:06 +0000

Well, it's difficult to tell the future, but I have seen no signs of any change in the approach.

Regarding licenses, the majority of Calligra is under LGPL with some small parts under GPL. All code contributions so far have been under LGPL.

Behind the KOffice split

marcH — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:18:42 +0000

> The situations have almost nothing in common.

For now?

Since you seem to know the situation well, could you please remind us what are the respective licences of all these?

Thank you LWN

halla — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 10:17:41 +0000

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

rvfh — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 09:52:43 +0000

What about the alleged breakage or lack of unit tests? Could you please shed some light on that point too?

Behind the KOffice split

mlankhorst — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 09:33:24 +0000

I'm afraid I have to disagree. In the 3.5 era konqueror was still pretty solid as a browser. Currently konqueror 4.5 with KWebkitPart is able to display pretty much all the pages again including gmail with the talk applet. I still prefer konqueror about dolphin for file browsing too, kio makes it a very powerful browser.

Thank you LWN

ingwa — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 08:44:59 +0000

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.

Behind the KOffice split

ingwa — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 08:18:39 +0000

I think most people are missing the point here. For KHTML, the code was copied from the KDE repository by Apple and then developed away from the community for a long time until it was released as a big code dump with so many changes that it was basically impossible to merge back into the main branch.

In the case with KOffice / Calligra and Nokia, the code is developed inside the main repository and committed one bugfix or feature at a time. For new features and complex bugfixes there is a review process using the KDE review board.

The situations have almost nothing in common.

Thank you LWN

niner — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 08:11:12 +0000

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...

Behind the KOffice split

jamesh — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 06:57:23 +0000

Asking that contributors not introduce test failures seems like a fairly reasonable request. Requiring them to include tests for new functionality also doesn't seem like a big ask if the infrastructure to write those tests exists.

I'm kind of surprised that Nokia would want to contribute to a project and not ensure that other contributors don't break all the features they've added.

Behind the KOffice split

mrshiny — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 03:42:41 +0000

Well, Google and Apple get all the credit in the mainstream for WebKit and meanwhile the Konqueror people are still relatively unknown. Not to mention that Safari is proprietary, and Chrome quasi-proprietary.

Behind the KOffice split

iabervon — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:19:55 +0000

Konqueror drove khtml development to the point where it was a suitable base for Apple to do the last mile to get webkit. I don't think I'd be particularly sad if what is currently KWord ended up as ODT support in Chromium, particularly if it also contributed behavior towards HTML5 contenteditable support. There are worse fates for an open source program than to be supplanted by a program based around a fork of the library that provided most of its functionality.

Behind the KOffice split

martinfick — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:01:39 +0000

konqueror may be forgotten by many, but its code still powers all the webkit based browsers out there (Safari, Chrome...)!

Behind the KOffice split

rvfh — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 22:31:48 +0000

KOffice reminds me konqueror: very nice and ambitious, but never quite up for the task, and eventually forgotten because bigger names fill the space.

I just hope that this will never happen to KDE as a whole...