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Comment by neepi

6 days ago

This is the standard voice of someone who's never had to deal with a badly maintained or managed open source product or an asshole maintainer or had to run a fork for 6 years because no one will merge a trivial fix in. Or had a LibreOffice bug open for a decade.

Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and will never be merged.

At that point I'll just use MS office. Costs me 10 minutes salary a month.

8 comments

neepi

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mmooss  6 days ago

I don't understand these stories: Do people talk to the maintainer before they work on the change? If not, why not? It seems necessary and obvious to get people on board before you invest in something.

  • dgrin91  6 days ago

    If you can get a discussion going with the maintainer, which is not a guarantee (cant speak to libre maintainers, but I know other projects like this), then you have to convince them that your change is both valuable and reasonable for them to maintain. The latter part there is key - they are _maintain_ers. You write the code once and then run off. If you write some new UI in some fancy framework then they have to live with it forever and learn a new framework to support it. Its a big cost for them, so on smaller projects maintainers can get defensive/grumpy

    • pietervdvn  6 days ago

      As such a maintainer: you hit the nail on the head.

      Add to that an infinite stream of bug reports and feature requests, and it gets tiring. I don't even have the time to answer all bug reports...

  • neepi  6 days ago

    Yes. Lucky if you even get noticed.

    • lukan  6 days ago

      I talked once to the OpenOffice maintainers (there was no LibreOffice yet) - they were really open for contributions.

      But I still did not contribute, because their understanding of a good UI was not what I had in mind.

      They are office people.

      (At least at that time, but I don't think that changed)

      And I was used to how graphical design software worked. I would have had to fork and that was out of my scope.

worthless-trash  6 days ago

But you can't fix that one either.

  • Iulioh  6 days ago

    Man, I hate how excel behave a lot of times but I thank God everyday that it exists.

    On the backend while writing macros you discover a lot of...interesting choices

    Like how sometimes my macros failed because it does not interface with the regional formatting of the system (had to take 0.34 and convert it to 0,34 by converting it to string). The reverse is not necessary.

    How value and value2 exists as property of a cell (I will bet whatever you want that it was a temporary name) and how the "value" behavior is dogshit.

    How stuff is hyper advanced but stuff that SHOULD work does not....

    It's an interesting look at it.