Why is Impress screwed up with EVERY release?

users
#1

Hi,

I installed 4.0.0 and loaded my main ODP file I need to teach my course, ran
the slide show, and as always, the developers managed to screw up Impress
again in 4.0.0. With EVERY release, things that worked fine get FUBAR. What
is it this time?

- In bulleted lists, where each bulleted item is animated to appear on a
button being pressed, the sequence is out of order, e.g. item #4 would
appear before #2 and so on.

- In a multi-line text box that is animated to appear as a whole on a button
being pressed, the last line already appears on the screen when the slide is
shown, i.e. before any other interaction. I wouldn't even know how to
achieve such an effect myself!

- Instead of graphics that have been on slides for years suddenly only an
"OLE" placeholder icon appears.

And yes, all these slides displayed perfectly fine in the last version of LO
I used.

Honestly, how does this happen? If nobody is working on Impress to even
check these absolutely basic things, be honest enough about it and drop it
from LO. But constantly, with every release, breaking things that worked
fine is plain ridiculous.

I don't mind minor bugs, but showstoppers like this are unreal.

Stephan

#2

Stephan P. wrote:

- In bulleted lists, where each bulleted item is animated to appear on a
button being pressed, the sequence is out of order, e.g. item #4 would
appear before #2 and so on.

- In a multi-line text box that is animated to appear as a whole on a button
being pressed, the last line already appears on the screen when the slide is
shown, i.e. before any other interaction. I wouldn't even know how to
achieve such an effect myself!

Hi Stephan,

this seems to be https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59629,
which is on our radar already.

- Instead of graphics that have been on slides for years suddenly only an
"OLE" placeholder icon appears.

Not aware of a bug report yet for that wrt. 4.0 - would you be willing
to file a bug report with an example document at
https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/bug/ please? It could be specific
to some kind of documents.

Honestly, how does this happen? If nobody is working on Impress to even
check these absolutely basic things, be honest enough about it and drop it
from LO. But constantly, with every release, breaking things that worked
fine is plain ridiculous.

There is a quite a range of possibilities here - QA volunteers
focusing more on other applications, platform specific problems,
document-specific bugs etc etc. The best advice to give at this point
probably is: get involved with our QA team! E.g. it could be you
running a handful of regression tests, on your platform, with your
files, prior to releases.

Head to https://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/qa-testers/ if you
are interested!

Thanks for notifying us in the first place, all the best,

-- Thorsten

#3

One other thing...

Are the problems you are experiencing happening with just this one document? Or does it happen with multiple other documents?

Were the problem documents created originally in LibO (or OOo)?

What format are the documents? Ie, are they .odp? .ppt? .pptx?

#4

I didn't read the whole thread as I just have a lot on my plate but being
involved with QA I have a few points;

1) are these reported as bug reports?

2) is it one document or all documents?

then please note:

3) Writer and Spreadsheet account for about 75% of our use base (if you
look at number of bugs reported against writer and spreadsheet you'll get
an idea of how popular they are). Because the vast number of our developers
work for FREE we have to prioritize and get to bugs that impact the largest
number of users. We have very few developers who know the presentation
code, those ones do a tremendous amount of work and should be thanked by
everyone for the service they provide.

4) If you want to contribute (either by developing, helping QA or giving
money) it may help get bugs squashed faster - there are plenty to go around
:wink:

Best,
Joel

#5

Let me start off by saying, I don't know how many times I coded something to fix one thing, worked on it for hours, that despite not seeing other errors, I fixed the thing I started out on.

That said. An amazingly simple test is to print the document with the old version and the new version, overlap them, hold it up to a window or put it on a light table. Objects not matching are much easier to see and, after 12 hours, I just might be mentally capable of actually seeing them.

I am very grateful and respect all working with LIbreOffice and this is not a slight. Do not misunderstand me.
Just what works for me.

If the same thing could be done on screen, it would be wonderful.
New version: Top layer 50%, Old version: bottom layer 75% transmissive.

This assumes locked-down test files. The other error I've tended to make is thinking I put a test file back the way it was instead of opening a fresh copy of the test file to check how I did.

It's not being lazy, just human and tired.

#6

Hi Joel, all

jmadero wrote

I didn't read the whole thread as I just have a lot on my plate but being
involved with QA I have a few points;

I think you should read the whole thread. This is about simple things that
always worked and now are broken.

This is about regressions.

And because the Devs think that a .0 release is trash and there wasn't
enough time or people to check this, this was bound to happen.

On the other hand the Directors of TDF and the Marketing team totally ignore
the fact that Devs expect a .0 release to have many errors and announce it
as "The free office suite the community has been dreaming of for twelve
years" and replace the Home page with a big commercial...

So, you should expect some angry new users and some upset old users who were
naive enough to upgrade to 4.0...

#7

So, you should expect some angry new users and some upset old users who
were
naive enough to upgrade to 4.0...

I hope some of this anger turns into something productive like
contributions, I know for sure QA could use some assistance to catch as
many of these issues as possible before release.

Best,
Joel

#8

While I wouldn't call it anger, I was honestly surprised that LO 4.0 *replaced* my previous install of LO 3.6.x. I thought it would install side-by-side. I confess I install these things so quickly, that I may have missed an install option somewhere.

But, I concur about some features that worked on 3.6 but not on 4.0. The most notable that I've found so far is that, in Writer, the F11 style list no longer opens to the setting it was on when I last closed. Now, on my computer (Win7), it always opens up to "Custom Styles," when I prefer it to open to "Hierarchical." LO 3.6 saved my "Hierarchical" setting, but LO 4.0 does not.

Virgil

#9

But, I concur about some features that worked on 3.6 but not on 4.0. The
most notable that I've found so far is that, in Writer, the F11 style list
no longer opens to the setting it was on when I last closed. Now, on my
computer (Win7), it always opens up to "Custom Styles," when I prefer it to
open to "Hierarchical." LO 3.6 saved my "Hierarchical" setting, but LO 4.0
does not.

I believe that this is known and is being investigated. With 20 million
lines of code, I hope everyone can imagine that regressions will happen and
we will do our very best to fix them as soon as possible.

As for the installing over 3.6 - not sure but in Linux this doesn't happen.
Others may have more feedback and it's feedback, cooperation and
contributions that help keep Open Source alive and vibrant.

Best,
Joel

#10

Joel Madero wrote (26-02-13 00:07)

[...] in Writer, the F11 style list
no longer opens to the setting it was on when I last closed. Now, on my
computer (Win7), it always opens up to "Custom Styles," when I prefer it to
open to "Hierarchical." LO 3.6 saved my "Hierarchical" setting, but LO 4.0
does not.

It's not nice, and has to be repaired.
But you can pls not seriously label such as a major problem, do you?

I believe that this is known and is being investigated.
[...]

Yes. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61429

Cheers,
Cor

#11

Yes. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/**show_bug.cgi?id=61429<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61429>

That might be a dupe, I could have sworn that myself or Joren bibisected
this one awhile back.....time to go digging I suppose.

Best,
Joel

#12

Believe me, I understand the massive task facing the LO developers, so I won’t complain too loudly if things aren’t perfect.

Virgil

#13

Pedro wrote:

And because the Devs think that a .0 release is trash and there wasn't
enough time or people to check this, this was bound to happen.

Hi Pedro,

we try to fix whatever major bugs get reported, and especially when
they are regressions. If you look into the bug I referenced, it was
not initially reproducible, and got escalated after the 4.0.0 release.

So I repeat my earlier statement - the best and most productive course
of action is to get involved. Give beta and rc versions a hard time,
report bugs, and help with triaging them (i.e. figure out how severe
they are, or if you can even reproduce them with your setup, and then
bring them to the attention of developers).

And as a developer, I clearly don't think the 4.0.0 is trash - in fact
it fixes a boatload of longstanding bugs, and adds lots of really
useful features. The 4.0.1, due 2nd week of March, will be even better.

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

#14

  Believe me, I understand the massive task facing the LO developers, so
I won’t complain too loudly if things aren’t perfect.

Again, we'd love to have you join some QA work to help us avoid these
issues going into the future, even if it's only an hour a week (or less).
Triaging a bug a day can take less than 10 minutes and is tremendously
helpful. Currently we have a backlog of about 1500 bugs. That means we have
1500 bugs that we aren't sure if they exist, and if they do, we're not sure
how important they are until QA gets to them.

If you, or anyone, wants to join us on IRC, the chat is quite active and
friendly :wink:

Find us: #libreoffice-qa on freenode

http://webchat.freenode.net/

for room put in #libreoffice-qa (with #)

Best,
Joel

#15

And as a developer, I clearly don't think the 4.0.0 is trash - in fact
it fixes a boatload of longstanding bugs, and adds lots of really
useful features. The 4.0.1, due 2nd week of March, will be even better.

From all of us who know how much work you and the other developers put

towards making LibreOffice incredible, thank you Thorsten. Hopefully this
conversation will get more people involved :smiley:

Best,
Joel

#16

Cor wrote:

It's not nice, and has to be repaired.
But you can pls not seriously label such as a major problem, do you?

By no means is this a major problem. It's just disappointing that it worked in LO 3.6 and doesn't in LO 4.0. Regressions may be better understood by programmers, but less educated end users like myself dislike going backward when we think we're going forward by installing an upgrade.

My overly simplistic mind naturally believes that a regression occurs when a programmer takes a perfectly good block of code and makes an unnecessary change to it. I'm sure it's far more complex than that, but understand that from where I sit, it looks like someone did something they didn't need to do, resulting in a regression.

Again, I'm not complaining, but perhaps it may be helpful for developers to have a better understanding of how end users perceive their work.

Virgil

#17

I'll check it out.

If there's a way that I think I can help, I'll be more than happy to do so.

Virgil

#18

I do believe that this is a common misconception. Code is inter-related in incredibly complex ways. Usually regressions happen when another bug is tackled in a completely different area of the code and the developers don't notice that some obscure function calls the same code in some funky way. To make it even trickier, with open source, developers kind of "have free reign" over how they code - whereas within a company there can be months of "how to's" before a programmer even is allowed to touch the code.

Ultimately it would be nice to have a "how do regression occur" blog (maybe something one of our brilliant developers can do ) so that common users can see how easy these things can happen.

Best,
Joel

#19

Hi :slight_smile:
+1

I've not had any bad experiences myself, so far, and not heard as many grumbles as we normally get here when a x.x.0 comes out.  Apparently AskLO has had a bit more than us but not as much as they were expecting either.  However i almost never use Impress anyway and haven't tried the 4.0.0 one at all.

The week of QA and bug-fixing a few weeks before release of the new branch was a smart idea!  I really liked that and think it might be good as a regular event before a new branch comes out.  Doing it before every sub-point release might scare people off and is not so important.  Perhaps before the x.x.3 or 4 to catch the branch halfway through?

More people routinely using the beta-test versions would be good and i think we can promote doing that a bit more on this list now that this is becoming more of an "advanced users" mailing list with real noobs being more attracted to AskLO and the proper forums.  I might move over there myself in the next few weeks. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#20

Hi Thorsten,

thanks a lot for your quick and helpful reply.

this seems to be https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59629,
which is on our radar already.

I'll take a look as soon as I have some time.

> - Instead of graphics that have been on slides for years suddenly
only an
> "OLE" placeholder icon appears.
>
Not aware of a bug report yet for that wrt. 4.0 - would you be willing
to file a bug report with an example document at
https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/bug/ please? It could be specific
to some kind of documents.

Sure, as soon as I find a bit of time, I'll try to cut my ODP down to
the essentials and submit it.

> Honestly, how does this happen? If nobody is working on Impress to even
> check these absolutely basic things, be honest enough about it and
drop it
> from LO. But constantly, with every release, breaking things that worked
> fine is plain ridiculous.
>
There is a quite a range of possibilities here - QA volunteers
focusing more on other applications, platform specific problems,
document-specific bugs etc etc. The best advice to give at this point
probably is: get involved with our QA team! E.g. it could be you
running a handful of regression tests, on your platform, with your
files, prior to releases.

I knew I had that coming, fair enough :-). I might be able to do that,
provided that an alpha or beta version doesn't conflict with an
installed older version, because I really *do* need that to work :-),
and the number of tests are well-defined.

Head to https://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/qa-testers/ if you
are interested!

OK, I'll take a look.

All the best,

Stephan