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Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

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Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#211

Post by JohnFen »

janoc wrote: post #202
JohnFen wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as an end user, it's made using applications based on (or even tangentially using, as I learned first-hand a couple of months ago) Python highly problematic due to extreme version incompatibility. I now try my best to avoid anything that involves Python.

Sorry but that's nonsense. Python 3 has been released in 2008 - 15 years ago. And the last Python 2 version has been EOLed 1.1.2020, three years ago, after a decade of deprecation! With your argument about compatibility no programming language would ever be able to evolve or deprecate/remove some features. Look at how many things changed e.g. between recent C++, Rust or C# major releases. Python had only one major re…

> Sorry but that's nonsense.

I'm not lying. This problem cost me a full weekend earlier this year. I may have misremembered the exact version numbers, though. Perhaps it wasn't between 2 and 3. Is there a Python 4?

The problem is that you can't have one Python interpreter that covers all versions of Python, and Python is very unforgiving about using the wrong interpreter version.

In any case, it was a serious problem that cost me a lot of time and really soured me on Python as an end user. I've not encountered a similar issue with any other language before, so this appears to be uniquely a Python thing.

But I don't know. I'm happy enough to just avoid Python-based anything whenever possible now.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#212

Post by Twirrim »

garba_dlm wrote: post #13
Twirrim wrote: post #9

Why on earth are we advocating for spamming the software foundation with emails about deprecating OpenOffice?

because someone is changing whitepsaces in the source code and pretending to maintain a stable/done piece of software. they're looking busy but are actually idle? this smells like fraud but I ain't cooking so why do I speak of smells?

Spamming the Apache Org with emails isn't going to change anything. There's no indication OP has even attempted to engage with the org and be told "No, we're keeping it alive" or similar.

This is straight to the signing petitions / harassment stage, without bothering to do anything else.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#214

Post by samus »

rbowen wrote: post #145
samus wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either the Project Management Commitee kicks it off, or the ASF's board does it. The fake activity in the repo is probably supposed to prevent attracting attention from the board: > When should a project move to the Attic? > Projects whose PMC are unable to muster 3 votes for a release, who have no active committers or are unable to fulfill their reporting duties to the board are all good candidates for the Attic. So…

No, the commit activity is not to prevent attracting the attention of the board, since the board does not monitor commit activity as a metric of project health.

No commit activity would indicate though that there are no active committees, which is one of the criteria whether a project belongs to the attic. Dunno whether that's one of the metrics or whether it is evaluated as required. However, usually people don't try to nefariously keep projects alive.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#215

Post by janoc »

AlbertCory wrote: post #210
janoc wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but that's nonsense. Python 3 has been released in 2008 - 15 years ago. And the last Python 2 version has been EOLed 1.1.2020, three years ago, after a decade of deprecation! With your argument about compatibility no programming language would ever be able to evolve or deprecate/remove some features. Look at how many things changed e.g. between recent C++, Rust or C# major releases. Python had only one major re…

all arguably true, but it has no bearing on whether 3 was necessary in the first place. > With your argument about compatibility no programming language would ever be able to evolve "evolve" and "change" are not ends in themselves. If it was usable as it was, then there was no need to evolve or change in an incompatible way. 15 years ago: also irrelevant. World War One was unnecessary, and that was 109 years ago. Wha…

There have been some very good reasons why Python 3 made those changes.

That you find them unnecessary because the original code was "usable as is" for you is irrelevant.

The reasons why these changes have been done (for a developer they have been fairly minor) has been hashed and rehashed for the past 15 years, Guido van Rossum wrote on it extensively too.

Most has been performance-related (Python 3 is significantly faster than 2) and probably the biggest user-visible change is the clean up of string handling with everything being Unicode now.

Frankly, anyone complaining about this stuff today is just beating the old dead horse for the sake of having something to complain about. The same like some people constantly bringing up the Linux systemd discussions after more than a decade, even though they are completely irrelevant today.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#216

Post by SSLy »

davidgerard wrote: post #194
davefisher-oo wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read what Rich wrote more carefully. It leterally does not come up often in that context. I got involved with OpenOffice once it came to the Incubator. I've put many many unpaid hours on the project. Mostly by supporting the websites and forum installations, but also by catherding on security. BTW - You can get help on LibreOffice on the OpenOffice Fora. Those people are there to help people. I've made $0 on twelve y…

> If you interested in helping then the type of developer needed is someone who understands old C++ and has a passion to modernize that. Adding myself to AOO as a C++ dev would be counter to the interests of the users - it would add to the impression that this dead project was not dead. You've got pull requests waiting that go back to 2019 . Dave, why aren't you pushing or rejecting any of those? If I was interested…

> The most useful way to help AOO users is to shoot AOO through the head and send them to LibreOffice.

Maybe we could get some bored whitehat to mine some 0days for a few weeks, then send them all at once, wait for inevitable 90 days, and then release high+ severity CVEs.

Purge by fire of a kind.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#217

Post by einstand »

ASF rules require a report from the PMC at every third month. There reports are written by the Project Membership Committee, and checked by the Board. (I know that they really read them).

Board reports (including project reports) are open (with 1-2 month delay, they are published only after approval, at the next Board Meeting).

You can find the report of OpenOffice project here: https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/OpenOffice.html

ps: just adding here as an additional source, I couldn't really judge the situation...

ps2: BTW, I think it's very interesting to read these project reports...

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#218

Post by Twirrim »

phkahler wrote: post #119
sparrc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely are relevant despite what the armchair experts say on HN. Do you use AWS or GCP or Fastly? These companies don't provide huge sponsorship dollars to Apache out of the goodness of their hearts. Many of the cloud services you use are backed by one or more Apache projects.

>> Many of the cloud services you use are backed by one or more Apache projects. So name the projects being used and not the dollars flowing to ASF. Also this is completely orthogonal to the fact that they keep OpenOffice "alive" strictly selfishly for their own benefit and to the detriment of LibreOffice.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server

Apache HTTPd accounts for nearly a third of the webservers in use on the internet today.

Apache Arrow underpins a swathe of datascience tooling, as does Apache Parquet.

Then there's Apache Kafka, and Apache Hadoop, naturally.

Apache Maven is still the predominant tool for doing Java compilation, and in the Java space lets not forget such things as Log4J, where we saw absolute chaos a couple of years ago caused by those vulnerabilities in it. Most of the cloud services you interact with, especially at Amazon, are written in Java.

The list of crucial projects leveraged by the wider industry goes on and on and on.

Yes, Apache seems to end up as a dumping ground for an awful lot of open source projects, but that's not all it is.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#219

Post by janoc »

JohnFen wrote: post #211
janoc wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but that's nonsense. Python 3 has been released in 2008 - 15 years ago. And the last Python 2 version has been EOLed 1.1.2020, three years ago, after a decade of deprecation! With your argument about compatibility no programming language would ever be able to evolve or deprecate/remove some features. Look at how many things changed e.g. between recent C++, Rust or C# major releases. Python had only one major re…

> Sorry but that's nonsense. I'm not lying. This problem cost me a full weekend earlier this year. I may have misremembered the exact version numbers, though. Perhaps it wasn't between 2 and 3. Is there a Python 4? The problem is that you can't have one Python interpreter that covers all versions of Python, and Python is very unforgiving about using the wrong interpreter version. In any case, it was a serious problem…

There is no Python 4 - and may not ever be.

If you have downloaded Python 2, you must have done it intentionally, it isn't even available from the Python.org website download anymore - and had not been for a long time.

>The problem is that you can't have one Python interpreter that covers all versions of Python, and Python is very unforgiving about using the wrong interpreter version.

Because it doesn't make sense. The language evolves. Nobody is going to stop working on it only because it could break some old code somewhere. The changes from 2 to 3 happened *15 years ago*.

There is no reason to try to compile/run old Python 2 code today - and if you still do need it for some reason, then you need to download the Python 2 version (which are still available, if you need them but one has to look for them). But then you better know what you are doing.

If some old code requires Python 2, any somewhat experienced Python developer will spot that right away (e.g. the use of print statement in Python 2 vs. print() function in Python 3 is a dead giveaway).

>In any case, it was a serious problem that cost me a lot of time and really soured me on Python as an end user. I've not encountered a similar issue with any other language before, so this appears to be uniquely a Python thing.

I don't doubt it has costed you a lot of time but this was a problem entirely of your own doing by not doing your homework.

You would have exactly the same problems if you tried to compile old K&R C code or C++ code from 20 years ago using modern compilers. Or tried to feed modern C# code to a compiler from 10 years ago. Or, God forbid, tried to run some modern Javascript code using old browser - or that old HTML with Flash and what not in a modern browser ...

Python is actually much more lenient in this regard because a major language change has happened only once, 15 years ago, with Python 2 being deprecated for well over a decade. The point releases are all upward compatible with no issues.

Re: Apache Open Office as an unmaintained project?

#220

Post by dale_glass »

augustk wrote: post #72
zoogeny wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a quote: "When you stop growing you start dying" (William S. Burroughs). I am not sure I believe that the kind of governance that Apache is providing is helping to grow the projects under its supervision. Your comparison to Terraform is also interesting. Apache Kafka, for example, has been absorbed by Amazon (MSK). Apache Spark is Amazon EMR. Just looking through Amazon's paid service offering I find several…

Why do you think software needs to grow?

Software as big as Open Office may not need to technically grow, but still needs a lot of work to stay current.

Various dependencies, like XML parsers, JPEG decoders, HTTP libraries, etc, change over time, drop deprecated APIs and need the main application to adapt. It'll also bump into the tech changing around it -- UTF8, year 2038, 64 bit CPUs, etc.

For a project this size it takes work just to stand still and keep it comfortably buildable on a modern Linux distro.

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