Open Office upgrade??

[Reinhold Rumberger]

On Sunday 14 February 2010, Ric Moore wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-02-14 at 12:17 +0100, Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> > PS: I'm not trying to be "in your face". This is just me being
> > realistic and somewhat annoyed with your rather childish
> > attitude.
> 
> I think that PA was merely an example

I assume so, too. However, it was an example for packagers not 
getting everything fixed in one version of the distro, which is a 
design decision and has been talked to death. I'm trying to prevent 
this discussion from maiming this thread.

> used as the topic was being
> forced into an dist-upgrade when one already knows the perils of
> doing so, just to get OpenOffice fixed. 

You don't need to. You simply need to add a PPA to your apt sources, 
and do a normal upgrade...
I did it long before I switched to Karmic; it works like a charm and 
is certainly not difficult.

> Now, after jumping
> through the hoops, and an entire Sunday morning devoted to it, I
> still have the very same problem as I had before. A limitation on
> the number of rows imported, when the spreadsheet opens a zillion
> extra columns ...which I assume eats up the amount of memory for
> rows. For the life of me, I cannot get rid of those extra
> columns. koffice spreadsheet imported those rows without a burp.
> But it also added a bunch of empty columns. Nor does it seem to
> have a "hide" feature. <sighs>

If you did install the packages from the OOo site, you should go have 
a look at the OOo bugtracker and see whether this has already been 
reported. Obviously, report a new bug if it hasn't been reported...


> But, Reinhold, you seem to get "annoyed" with what you consider
> childish opinions of others

Just nit-picking here, but I'm not annoyed with his opinion 
(especially about PA, with which I heartily agree), I was being 
annoyed at the manner he chose to present it. See below. (Just for 
context, I'm including what I was referring to below.)

I'm taking offence to this, because Gene implies that for one thing, 
the general crappiness of PA is the fault of the packagers and for 
another, that they only care about whether the software works for 
them. IME, the packagers are hardworking people going out of their 
way to do a rather thankless job and just don't deserve this kind of 
abuse. I'm obviously prejudiced since I'm a developer myself - not 
for Ubuntu or pretty much anything Linux-related, but the abuse we 
get seems to always be along the same lines. Strangely, there's no 
praise for all the things that *do* work.

Also, there's the generally insulting manner in which he put this, 
coupled with his continued attempts at thread-hijacking.

> On Sunday 14 February 2010, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > That is my point.  And its meant as a general rant about
> > attitudes.   Apparently the developers do seem to be able to make
> > it work, or they get their cubicle noises from the air
> > conditioning, whatever.  They would appear to be oblivious to the
> > problems audio has developed since PA came on the scene, because
> > the fixes if there are any, aren't being propagated. Before PA,
> > we could fix us up a custom modprobe.conf and it all works.  PA
> > apparently ignores that even if it does exist, 'it knows better
> > than we do' I guess.
> > 
> > Your statement about the packagers time being valuable is rather
> > a slap in  the face to us.  We put our pants on one leg at a 
> > time, exactly as they do.

I hope this helps you see my reasons for being annoyed this time... 
:-)

  --Reinhold