LibreOffice contributor interview: Anxhelo Lushka

This year’s LibreOffice Conference will take place in late September in Albania. One of the organisers is Anxhelo Lushka, a member of the Albanian LibreOffice community – we caught up with him at the last conference to talk about his experiences of building a community, how developers and designers can work together, and what we can look forward to in Tirana…

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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.0.2

Berlin, March 1st, 2018 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 6.0.2, the second minor release of the recently announced LibreOffice 6 family in just over a month, with around 50 bug and regression fixes. All LibreOffice users are invited to update either to LibreOffice 6.0.2 or to LibreOffice 5.4.5 to solve potential security-related issues.

TDF suggests to conservative users and enterprises to deploy LibreOffice with the backing of certified developers, migrators and trainers (an updated list is available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/). This is extremely important for the growth of the LibreOffice ecosystem.

Technical details about LibreOffice 6.0.2 bug and regression fixes are available in the change log: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.0.2/RC1 (fixed in RC1).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 6.0.2 is immediately available for download at the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and fund the activities of local communities, such as the event in Surabaya, Indonesia, on March 23/25 (http://libreoffice.id) or the hackfest in Hamburg, Germany, on April 6/8 (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Hamburg2018).

Several companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) provide either value-added LTS versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and training, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice 6.0: Exploring the QA statistics

By Xisco Faulí, Quality Assurance (QA) engineer

LibreOffice 6.0 was released on January 31 and this is what happened during its development in LibreOffice’s Bugzilla, which started when the 5.4 branch was branched off from master on May 18 2017.

Note: This blog post has been created based on bugs in Bugzilla that have the whiteboard ‘target:6.0.0’, which means a commit for that bug is included in the release. Other commits referring to other bug trackers (ofz, coverity, rhbz, bnc, etc…) are not covered here, as well as others commits not having a reference to our bug tracker (ie refactoring commits).

In LibreOffice 6.0, a total number of 926 bugs and 88 enhancements were worked on, of which 747 were reported during 2017 (73%), and 267 (27%) between October 2010 and December 2016. July 2017 and August 2017 were the months with more reports, 104 and 108 respectively.

284 reports are related to Writer, 175 to Calc, 134 to LibreOffice in general and 112 to Impress.

This is all thanks to 382 users who reported them.

TOP 10 Reporters

Xisco Faulí ( 74 )

Yousuf Philips (jay) ( 69 )

Telesto ( 59 )

Tamás Zolnai ( 44 )

Aron Budea ( 38 )

Gabor Kelemen ( 26 )

Regina Henschel ( 23 )

Samuel Mehrbrodt (CIB) ( 22 )

Mike Kaganski ( 18 )

Olivier Hallot ( 17 )

Once a report has been created in Bugzilla, a third person needs to jump in, triage and confirm it in order to set it to NEW. This is a very important step as it helps the QA Team to deal with the hundreds of bug reports we receive every week.

Doing it in a short period of time after the bugs are reported guarantees those with more priority get fixed more quickly.

67% of the reports were confirmed within the first day, 84% within the first week and 93% within the first month.

Comparing when the reports were created and when they were confirmed gives a similar chart.

This is all thanks to 113 users who confirmed them.

Top 10 Confirmers

Xisco Faulí ( 225 )

Buovjaga ( 92 )

Yousuf Philips (jay) ( 48 )

Aron Budea ( 42 )

Julien Nabet ( 38 )

raal ( 37 )

Tamás Zolnai ( 28 )

Heiko Tietze ( 28 )

Alex Thurgood ( 25 )

V Stuart Foote ( 23 )

Finally, once the reports have been confirmed and triaged, the developers need to investigate and fix them. Sometimes, it can be trivial fix that takes a few minutes to get fixed – sometimes it takes several man days.

10% of the reports got fixed within one day, 51% within one month and 80% within one year.

Taking a closer look at the period between 2017-05-18 and the final release, 111 bugs were fixed in average a month, being August 2017, September 2017 and October 2017 the highest, with 147, 147 and 139 reports fixed respectively.

This is all thanks to 100 developers who fixed them.

Top 10 fixers

Caolán McNamara ( 105 )

Tamás Zolnai ( 57 )

Julien Nabet ( 48 )

Eike Rathke ( 46 )

Miklos Vajna ( 43 )

Michael Stahl ( 41 )

Adolfo Jayme ( 41 )

Yousuf Philips (jay) ( 39 )

Justin L ( 31 )

Heiko Tietze ( 28 )

For more QA statistics, please watch my recent talk at FOSDEM 2018:
https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/ode_overview/

Join in, and help our QA community to polish future LibreOffice releases! We’re a friendly and growing project, and there are many ways to get involved: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/GetInvolved

Making Macro Programming a Breeze: The BASIC & API Reference Cards

Update: Reference card for runtime library is now available.

One of the recurring issue when using LibreOffice as a replacement of other office applications is the migration of macros to the LibreOffice BASIC dialect and objects. While the LibreOffice BASIC programming language is almost standard, the objects inside a document have different names, methods and properties, and a rework on the macro is necessary in most cases to make it operational again, when imported from other suites.

(more…)

Sunday Marketing #6

Last week, we have published the crash report chart just two days after the announcement of LibreOffice 6.0.1, to show the impact of the new version on the issues reported by Windows users.

Ten days after the announcement the impact is even more visible, and the chart on the left shows that the situation is now under control.

The trend shows how important is for LibreOffice users to quickly update to the last available version to reduce the number of potential issues.

LibreOffice 6.0: The stats so far

On January 31, we released LibreOffice 6.0 (shortly followed up by 6.0.1). So what has happened in the last two weeks? Let’s look at some statistics…

969,108 downloads

Yes, there have been almost 1 million downloads of LibreOffice 6.0 since release day. Of course, this is just part of the overall downloads of LibreOffice – we also offer the “still” 5.4 family, which has reached version 5.4.5 and is more suited to enterprise deployments.

661,539 visits to our website

Our main website is the central resource for all things LibreOffice, including downloads, release notes, help, community support and more.

252,495 visits to our blog

Most of these were for the release announcement, but we’ve been posting other updates as well. On a related note, if you want to follow blog posts by other members of the LibreOffice community, check out the TDF Planet.

Over 3,500 donations

Donations are the lifeblood of The Document Foundation: they help us to support the LibreOffice project with infrastructure, events and a small team working on release management, quality assurance (QA), marketing, design and documentation. Click here to see how we used donations in 2016 – and see this page if you’d like to support us too. A huge thanks to everyone who donated!

80,516 views of our New Features video

As with previous releases, for LibreOffice 6.0 we made a video showcasing some of the great new features. (And on the topic of videos, we’ve just uploaded talks and presentations from the LibreOffice community at FOSDEM, Europe’s biggest free software developer meetup – click here for the playlist.)

87,358 impressions of the announcement tweet

We use Twitter to spread the word about LibreOffice, free software and open standards, and thanks to our supporters who retweeted the announcement, over 87,000 people saw it. It also had 561 retweets and 621 likes.

32,578 people reached on Facebook

Another social media platform we use is Facebook, where our page has 51,987 likes. In addition, we’re active on Google+ where we have 16,731 followers, and our announcement of LibreOffice 6.0 received 217 +1s.

So that’s an overview of activity in the last two weeks – but there’s much more going on in the LibreOffice project! If you’d like to get involved with a friendly community that’s passionate about open source and open standards, you can help us in many ways – see this page to get started.

And thanks to everyone in the community who helped to make LibreOffice 6.0 happen!