Open Office upgrade??

[Reinhold Rumberger]

On Sunday 14 February 2010, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Saturday 13 February 2010, Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> >On Saturday 13 February 2010, Ric Moore wrote:
> >> On Sat, 2010-02-13 at 18:44 +0000, Chris Jones wrote:
> >> > On 13 Feb 2010, at 5:56pm, Ric Moore wrote:
> >> > > I'm having a couple of problems with OpenOffice. I install
> >> > > just what is available from the repos. I had my share of
> >> > > grief, when I used Fedora, with too new beta software so
> >> > > I'm a tad gun shy to install packages not "official". Yet,
> >> > > when I try to enter a bug report, the site advises me to
> >> > > upgrade before it'll accept my bug report. <sighs> I have
> >> > > Open Office 3.01 installed (1:3.01-9) and am running
> >> > > Jaunty.
> >> > 
> >> > OO 3.01 is quite far behind the current release, 3.2,
> >> 
> >> Ergo the problem. Should this be updated in the repo??
> >> 
> >> > so I'm not that surprised that the first response is to
> >> > upgrade to 3.2 and try again ... Of course jaunty won't get
> >> > an update
> >> 
> >> Why is that?? Karmic destroys my sound system, which works just
> >> fine, for now.
> >
> >The point is that wildly adding new software versions to the repo
> >will result in bit rot and eventually render a system unusable.
> >This way, it will always stay at least close to the quality it
> >was when it was shipped - be that high or low.
> 
> I'll argue that point.  The initial release might have its warts,
> I think going from 10 folks running it last week, to 10,000+ a
> week after a new one is released _is_ gonna find new bugs those
> 10 guys didn't.

You're confusing introducing new versions with fixing bugs - there 
are quite a lot of bugs getting fixed especially in the first few 
weeks without integrating a newer upstream version. There will, 
obviously, be a few exceptions where integrating a new upstream 
version is absolutely necessary - but those are very rare.

> But its seem to me that 90 days or so on, those bugs ought to be
> fixed by the simple expedient of doing regular updates, and the
> process should continue getting better as the release ages.

There's going to be a point where the bug doesn't affect enough 
people to bother fixing in a given release. It'll usually be fixed in 
the next release, if it's fixed at all.
Packagers' time's valuable, too, y'know. They'll tend to focus on 
high-priority bugs that don't have a viable workaround...

<snipping ramblings about pulse audio>

a) No thread hijacking, please!!
b) PA is quite easy to remove - just use your favourite package
   manager.
c) The PPA link was for OOo, nothing at all to do with PA.

  --Reinhold