LibreOffice 7.6 RC2 Available For Last Minute Testing Of This Open-Source Office Suite

[ClosedSource]

1) Unable to reproduce - this despite the fact that you provide concrete examples of the behavior and how to reproduce.

2) Accusations that you are a "troll".

3) A statement along the lines of "patches welcome", i.e. I am expected to fix their software.

4) It's not a bug, it's the way it's supposed to work.

Yeah, I've learned all of this in the last 30 years. Even high quality open source software is a form of legalized abusive behavior. Everyone is basing products on someone else's labor. Google makes money off other people's work on the Linux kernel. Microsoft makes money off the open source chromium project and dotnet core sdk. People "were" basing products off RHEL srpms.
I've reported countless bug reports over the decades in open source projects. A bug with a particular layout gets a "I can't reproduce with another layout" which is a useless reply. App crashes when system locale is 'de' gets a reply "I can't repro in en_us locale" (apparently typing reproduce is challenging).
Or the "patches welcome" reply. Now I fix bugs locally and never send developers patches because of this nonsense. Not everyone prays to statues of Torvalds or Richard Stallman.

[Nth_man]

> [mSparks wrote:]
> cell D3
> =IF(RAND()<C3,"heads","tails")

> Cells E7 to E16
> =MULTIPLE.OPERATIONS(E$6,$B$2,$D7)
> ...
> =MULTIPLE.OPERATIONS(E$6,$B$2,$D16)

Tried. Works for me. [...]

It also worked for me in Calc.

Each time that I press F9, different results are shown, of course.

[quikee]

I love this thread because it beautifully encapsulates everything wrong with open source software. If you bring an issue to the attention of an open source developer, many times you get one of the following responses:

1) Unable to reproduce - this despite the fact that you provide concrete examples of the behavior and how to reproduce.

He didn't do that - I EXPLICITLY said he should file a bug and provide a reproducer (document). None was done or provided. I'm not taking people seriously if they can't do the simple basic thing. If there is an existing bug - show it or it's just BS.

2) Accusations that you are a "troll".

Yes, that was out of line but I got fed up with the insults, unfunded accusations and dodging. He did show troll like behavior - he is not really interested to resolve this issue at the slightest and in every time posts memes to insult to rub it in that LibreOffice doesn't handle some case correctly, which is something he failed to demonstrate. It's also not about LibreOffice RNG not working (which is quite serious if true, and the reason it got my attention), but he has some super corner case LibreOffice (supposedly?) doesn't handle correctly for some reason (nothing to do with RNG as I showed so it could be many non-related things).

3) A statement along the lines of "patches welcome", i.e. I am expected to fix their software.

Something I never said or said anything similar. But generally you have the possibility with open source to fix it yourself or pay people to fix it for you, which is not something you have otherwise. Usually the QA or devs will say this when you file an enhancement or insignificant corner case bug that they don't think is important and will be prioritized very low. I understand this kind of response can be shitty for users.

4) It's not a bug, it's the way it's supposed to work.

Again something I never said - you switched from talking about how this is a "case encapsulating everything wrong with open source" to talking in general what you perceive is the problem.

But yes, not everything is a bug - you have to establish that the behavior is not correct and not just different than <insert your favorite office suite> or it is an inherit limitation (for example - can't fix how floating-point numbers work).

I'll give everyone an even more laughable example, Open Office. In college i used to do a lot of chemical reaction analysis and a lot is done by putting data in a spreadsheet, graphing it and then dropping in a trend line, as a way of modeling how a reaction progresses over time.

Excel, and Libre Office allowed you to set the x,y intercept of the trend line to 0,0; Open Office does not. They have known about this for years, but they have refused to fix it.

Ironically, do you know why LibreOffice has this and OpenOffice doesn't? Because, I implemented it [1] in my free time because I thought it is an important - including all the missing trendline type and the possibility to add multiple trendlines. Took me 2 months to get all the things working (imporvement to the trendlines - not just changing the intercept value). What did you do about it except of crying on Phoronix (or similar) forum?

[1] https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreof...11e8dd38fc166c

Also OpenOffice didn't "refuse to fix it" - they just didn't fix it because of different priorities and at that time (just like now) I don't even think they were capable of fixing it. If they would refused to fix it they would close the bug.

Here's the thing, open source developers are not making any money from the software they write, so there's little incentive to do a good job, there's no chance of them being fired or losing customers, if you stop using their software, who cares.

I'm a paid open source developer now - I will lose my job if I don't perform well too as well as geting fired for a loss of a customer.

Microsoft developers on the other hand make big bucks. 20 years ago MS had an advertisement for Jr and Sr Software Developers; the Jr Developers needed to have a Masters degree in Comp Sci or similar field and the Sr. Developers had to have a Ph.D. in Comp Sci or similar field. The starting salary for a Jr. Developer was 125k per year and the starting salary for a Sr. Developer was 250k per year.

Contrast that with working for free.

MS Office has been Microsoft's cash cow for decades and frankly it is the premiere office suite available. It is one of the killer apps that makes Windows a must have OS.

It's unfair to expect a free office suite to provide the same level of quality as a product that MS has probably spent a billion dollars over a couple of decades of development.

Correct, except most of the work is not done for free at all - Open source consultancies exist if you haven't noticed.

Yes, MS is strong and when they want something they will throw all the resources at it to do it, which is something we can't afford so we have to improvise with what we have (and then get trash tallked in the various forums, becasue we didn't address some user's favourite pet bug yet). Still, we won't just give up because the competition is strong. Also I'm not saying people shouldn't use MS Office, I think it's great software and an inspiration.

[quikee]

It also worked for me in Calc.

Each time that I press F9, different results are shown, of course.

Yes, but he didn't show what he has in E6 (is it just a plain string and not a formula?) - he is referencing it in the MULTIPLE.OPERATIONS formula (first parameter) but never references D3 cell, which has the actual formula with RAND, so how should this work? if you use E6 with just a plain string "heads" then everything is "heads" AS EXPECTED! If instead of E6 you use D3 then it works fine. In any way - if he has a case it is a super corner case and not at all LibreOffice RNG not working and actually if MSO works with this I am not convinced it is correct (not everything MSO does is de-facto correct). In any way.. I'm tired of his dishonesty.

[ClosedSource]

He didn't do that - I EXPLICITLY said he should file a bug and provide a reproducer (document). None was done or provided. I'm not taking people seriously if they can't do the simple basic thing. If there is an existing bug - show it or it's just BS.

There are three sides to this:
1. The developer team who should be able to find bugs on their own
2. Users who knows of bugs and prefer to whine about them on phoronix instead of doing something useful like filing bugs with reproducers. You can tell them to f off.
3. People who are actually suffering because of the bugs. You have to be very gentle with those when asking for reproducers. Their priorities are legitimately and responsibly elsewhere. If you want reproducers from them, start by apologizing about any problems or inconvenience the bugs may have caused. That's your real crowd. Real people who use your software and don't have time to go to phoronix or your bugzilla.

[mSparks]

Yes, but he didn't show what he has in E6 .

=D3

its an Excel datatable

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/calculate-multiple-results-by-using-a-data-table-e95e2487-6ca6-4413-ad12-77542a5ea50b

So
=IF(RAND()<C3,"heads","tails")
goes in D3

=D3 goes at the top of the data table (in this case E6)
(in practice this would be the answer of a very long series of calculations)
then "what if analysis"->datatable, and "column input value" just equals anywhere on the sheet, or the cell you want to put the far left column of the data table.

attached as a zip