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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Bugs in OOo and compatibility issues
From:       Inge Wallin <inge () lysator ! liu ! se>
Date:       2009-02-25 9:48:04
Message-ID: 200902251048.04413.inge () lysator ! liu ! se
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On Tuesday 24 February 2009 16:55:22 you wrote:
> Hello Inge,
>
> > Bug 185354 (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185354) is about a bug
> > that introduces an incompatibility with OpenOffice.org.  The bug itself
> > is in OOo, in the way that it saves its files, no doubt about that.
>
> I can't see any incompatibility here. What happens is that we show some
> more text oo files to mark accordingly. This is easy to fix. Just go to the
> master slide and remove the content of that fields you don't like to have.
> Not sure why you call that a incompatibility.

The incompatibility is not on a technical level, but on the user level.  It 
goes like this:

1. The user creates a presentation in OO Impress. He is satisfied with how it 
looks and saves it.
2. The user tries to open it in KPresenter and sees more text than expected, 
and also overlaid with the expected text.  He is not satisfied and concludes 
that Kpresenter has bugs and that he cannot use it.

And even after he is made aware that it's actually OOo's bug, he still cannot 
use Kpresenter since he already made the presentation with Impress.

> > However, the nature of the bug is such that if we don't work around it,
> > then we can just forget about anybody that ever saved a presentation in
> > OO Impress to ever use KPresenter. Yes, it's that bad.
> >
> > I would like to discuss how to handle this.  In general I don't think we
> > should encourage buggy files by supporting the bugginess in our
> > application. But in this case, we can't just ignore it IMHO.
>
> Unfortunately it is not possible to work around that bug easily. It would
> require to look at the OO source code to find out when to handle a shape as
> a placeholder and when not.

Yes, unfortunately not all workarounds like this are easy. I agree with some 
of the other posters that we will either have to look at the source code of 
Impress or start a dialog with them.  The dialog should be tried first.

If you like, I can write a mail to the dev list of OOo, since I'm a member of 
it and start a thread there.

> I think that is out of scope as it is quite easy to work around the problem
> inside koffice.

Easy if you:
 - Are actually aware that the bug is able to be worked around with a setting
 - Know exactly how to do it
 - Care in the first place.

I think that for many people who try out KOffice and KPresenter neither one 
will be true.

> I have one workaround for a bug inside kpresenter where ooimpress saved
> data quite wrong. However in that case it is easy to see that it is wrong
> and also it is easy to fix.
>
> In general I'm against putting workarounds inside our code to fix bugs of
> other apps. That only makes the code much more difficult to handle and to
> understand.

Agreed.  But as somebody else wrote, we will have to bend our necks a bit if 
we want users to take us seriously.  I like the analogy with Firefox and how 
it works around bugs in other browers to create a "just works" feeling.

> Another idea would also be an FAQ entry describing the problem and how to
> work around it.

We could do that as well, but I don't think it's good enough by itself.

	-Inge
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