LibreOffice happy to work with Coverity Scan results
Spending part of my time to LibreOffice QA, I look over the web page displaying all the commits for LibreOffice code (1) from time to time.
The last months, I saw an large amount of commits related to ‘Coverity’. I remembered that name from years back, in the old OpenOffice.org project.
To explain: Coverity is a project that runs all kind of automated code checks, discovering typical but often hidden programming errors. Memory leaks, but also errors that may cause little, not so often encountered errors for the users. The reports from Coverity are a valuable contribution to – among others – the LibreOffice development process.
The work on using the Coverity reports for LibreOffice is done by a variety of LibreOffice developers, some on the building and testing, others on the other work to fix the issues. In the first months many hundred improvements have been made, making LibreOffice more robust, better. There are still some few thousand issues left however 🙂 So pls get in contact if you like to help with these improvements.
Again it’s lovely to see that core and volunteer developers work together to get thousands of improvements in the LibreOffice code.
Of course in this special case it only can be done with to the work of the Coverity team, that helps open source projects to become more stable and improve quality. Thanks a lot for that!
Thank You LibreOffice for such a good product! I had downloaded the version 4 and was extremely frustated, I had numerous issues, including my limited knowledge of how to use the product. I had just about decided that I was going to have to break down and spend money I do not have on Microsoft Office, when I saw there was an update available that fixed some bugs. After reading this blog I realized I need the simpler 3.6.6 version. I uninstalled the original software and installed the 3.6.6. I am so much happier now and so greatful for this product that I made a much deserved donation!!!
Thanks for your comment. What you more or less explain is the difference between very early releases in a version (e.g. 4.0.0 and 4.0.1) and the later releases in a version (e.g. 3.6.6 etc.). Very much depending on your circumstances and skills, the early releases can be difficult. If that is the case for you, then it is better to wait for later releases to enjoy the new features. On the other hand: people testing early releases, and taking care for good bug reports, of course are a key factor in LibreOffice development.
I am user of LO myself & it brings me great joy to read comments like the one above from RandiR.
Thank you for your product that is free in every sense, we have benefited so much from it. 🙂
Libre office just caused me to lost all of my recent work thank you so much I’m going back to Microsoft office.
I suspect that your recent work is still accessible one way or another. Maybe if you give us more information, we can help you find it. Of course you need to use the tools that work for you, but in my experience, LO is great and getting better all the time.
I’m sorry if this is the wrong place to post this comment, but I’ve clicked around the Libre Office site and can’t find an appropriate place. I’ve been writing on computers for many years going back to the 1980s, when I was a full-time journalist. Before Microsoft came along, I tried a number of different programs and ended up selecting one called PC Outline.
People would tell me about WordStar, Word Perfect, and Microsoft Word, and I would ask, does it outline? The answer was no, and I’d say, thanks but no thanks. That’s a deal breaker.
Eventually, Microsoft Word added an outliner, and I began looking at the features. At first, the outliner was garbage, compared to PCO. Eventually, it acquired enough features for me to make the switch.
I’m looking at new computers in the next couple of months, and when I upgrade, I’m going to reinstall MS Office 2003 for a while. I don’t want to upgrade that program. I want to switch to Libre Office. But the crappy outline functions that are limited to the navigator are a deal breaker for me, just as they were when MS Office was first starting out.
I understand that the view within Libre Office developers is, “We’re not a copy of MS Office.” That’s fine. I agree with your point.
So could you please add the functionality of PC Outline from the 1980s? And by the way, if you really want to emphasize that you’re not a MS copy, give your software the ability to import PCO files from the 80s, which is something I really wish I could do. I want to read those old files.
This would make the statement “We’re not copying MS. We’re copying PCO.”
Could you please repost this comment to the appropriate feature request list? Thank you.
Cougar
And by the way, I’d like to find a way to track comments on this feature request, but I don’t know my way around. When you forward it to the appropriate list, would you please find a way to do that for me or to inform me about how to do it. Thank you.
I have sample pco files if they’re needed.
I’ve left a detailed analysis of why specific outliner feature are REQUIRED for the most creative writers, but I’m totally available for discussion if needed.
thanks for your detailed ideas Cougar,
pls look here https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugReport for the way to bring your ideas in a structured way, that is most helpful for the project and that allows you to track, comment, help further etc.
kind regards,
A small “in topic” comment. I’m a professional programmer that got involved in big projects form time to time. I just want to say that tools like Coverity can be very useful, but taking the route ” Let’s fix all coverity issues” has been a source of troubles for me in the past…
We know that this is impossible and we have an incredibly high false positive rate so we have the difficult task of finding the important ones and we will concentrate on these. That said we are always looking new for new developers helping out with improving the code base.