This morning I got an email about bug 37134 from the LibreOffice bug tracker. They flagged it as spam. Up until you got to the link it wasn’t spam. It did serve as a good reminder to me about just how long this bug has been open. I felt compelled to offer the developers some sage advice given my 40+ years in IT.
LibreOffice is a Legacy Product
Please click on the link and take a gander at that bug report. In particular the date it was filed: 2011-05-12. Now take a look at the screen shot from Lotus Symphony.
Yes, I’ve written about Lotus Symphony on this blog before. Please note the document tabs. The general history of this incarnation of Lotus Symphony is that IBM took the OpenOffice (remember that?) code, modified it profusely to make it a much more modern product, then returned the code to OpenOffice when they abandoned Lotus Symphony. IBM only wanted a new editor for Lotus Notes and possibly other things. Lotus Symphony was just a proof of concept. Many things, like the navigator, made it into LibreOffice.
The LO developers are not happy when people point out all this code was turned over to them. Just for grins and giggles, take a look at the last release dates for Symphony.
The Mantra
Every time someone requests a UI change, not just in this bug, most every bug, the developers respond with much the same mantra.
Writing code is the least problematic part of implementing any big feature. You'd need to study the existing codebase and figure out how to connect various parts of the code to make sure it's both working and robust
People don’t admit it, but this is the battle cry of a legacy product. End users phrase it differently.
Nobody knows what it does.
Peruse the LO bug reports/feature requests and you will see quite a number get a “the size of the code base” response.
Been Almost 15 Years since bug 37134 was filed
I think we can all agree much has changed in the world of software. Quite a number of operating systems no longer exist. Some were most deservedly cast in the trash. (Windows Vista any one?) Back in the day application frameworks and products had to carry along things that are widely available now. Word processors had to create their own font rendering and image handling libraries.
When SUN created OpenOffice they pitched it as something to let Java strut its stuff, yet a great big hunk of it was written in C because Java wasn’t a good tool. SUN is no more. Management made a whole string of bad decisions and desperately clung to the $25,000 proprietary desktop workstation when PCs were gaining ground. Proprietary Unix platforms like Solaris were being replaced by Linux and to a lesser extend BSD.
Haven’t looked, but am told there no longer is Java in the core of LO. If it still exists it may only exist in plugins. Things change.
FORTRAN is even cool again! The dirty little secret of AI is all of the FOTRAN jobs now posted. Yep, some critical parts are FORTRAN in most, if not all, of them. Java is off suffering from the same obscurity as Commodore Amiga software.
Remember When Browsers Didn’t have Tabs?
Yeah, most of you aren’t old enough to remember GUI DOS marketed as the Windows Operating System. Damned few of you ever ran OS/2. We had one CPU. It had one core. Multi-tasking in the PC world pretty much required multiple computers. Those of us coming from the DEC world were used to EDT.
[GOLD]-7 FIND =buffernameThat’s how you “switched documents.” We were fine with that. Our good terminals had 132 columns and 25 lines. We didn’t have mice. GUI DOS had a hard 640K memory limit with a hodge-podge of tricks to address the 384K above that and worse tricks for addressing up to 2MB of RAM.
We didn’t have enough machine to handle multiple documents at once.
WordPerfect clung to what is now becoming trendy again; Distraction Free Writing. No menus, no nothing. Just a blank screen. Poohoo it all you want, it was used to write the Harry Potter series, just not the first book.
Abandoned LO
I used LO to write some titles of my award winning technical book series. The very last title I wrote with it was my Agile book. The poor girl had to wait a half hour for it to load on her laptop. It was a bitch for me with my hp Z2G4 with an i7-8700 and 32GB of RAM. Some of my older titles can no longer be opened and edited with current versions of LO. They have a drastic backward compatibility problem. There is a reason people pay $400 for WordPerfect.
Clean Sheet of Paper
In all honesty, what we’ve learned here, is really big stuff can’t be designed by committee. Eventually you need a very small team and a clean sheet of paper. Most importantly, Agile is NOT Software Engineering. The first clean sheets of paper need to be filled with the Waterfall SDLC. First a list of features and “how” from a high level. Then you choose the programming language and tools.
Is C/C++ still the language for LO development? It certainly has the most developers with college degrees, but I haven’t kept tabs on other languages word processor/text editor development capabilities. I know CudaText has exploded as an Open-Source text editor and it is written in Object Pascal if you can believe that.
Modernizing the Code Base
In the current world of C/C++ re-development (or my world) everybody is re-basing on SDL3. Provides full cross platform I/O, ttf rendering, and lets mere mortals for font rendering and other uses so applications speed up. So, with respect to tabbed UI, just how much of the code base could be eliminated by using SDL3 or some other modern, well maintained, cross platform I/O and rendering package?
Haven’t looked at LO code as I’ve got my own legacy modernization stuff going on with LS-CS a fork of CopperSpice which is fork of Qt 4.8. Even in today’s Qt that just dropped Windows 10 support to howls from customers on the mailing list, there is an ocean of dead legacy code. I just got rid of about half the code base in LS-CS. Once I modernize the CUPS API and create a VCPKG build for Windows, that will be the end of the project. It will be rebranded LsX and move to CodeBerg. There the incredibly painful rebasing to SDL3 will begin. After that I should know everything I need to for BasisDoctrina. A from scratch SDL3 based application framework.
Summary
A single document interface (SDI) is so early 1990s it isn’t even funny. If you have menus that get displayed by default you can’t even claim to be a distraction free word processor like FocusWriter.
Historic document file support, routinely abandoned by LO, is why people pay money for word processors. I bought a 5-user license for SoftMaker Office because of this. Even OnlyOffice has tabbed document interface and it is also free.
It’s time for Linux distros to stop including LO. I know Manjaro caught a lot of flack for including FreeOffice (the free limited version of SoftMaker Office) because one had to register to get a free license, but distros need to turn their back on LO. It’s a legacy product that paints people into corners. For a letter home to mom from summer camp it is fine, but for any document you just might want to be able to edit 2+ years later, no.
