[libreoffice-website] A new year and a new inconsistency between website and the TDF update service...

Hi there,

/API/new/year/2021/everyone! =)


What's best to start the year than being witness and victim of a 
flame-war and having to deal with it with only one valid hand typing in 
on the keyboard? :P (broke my arm at Christmas, Santa brought a great 
gift, for sure! :/)...

That's what's happening again right now with me being the unlucky 
maintainer of the LibreOffice packages for Chocolatey[1] :/



# Problem 1

A few weeks after the 6.4 become EOL'ed, the TDF update service targeted 
the 7.0 branch, that's great! and this got reflected auto/magic/ally at 
[2], with libreoffice-still now being at 7.0.3.

However, the fact that the website is still proposing the 6.4 
immediately from the download page (and not from download archive) is a 
problem and causing lots of consistency trouble among end users who are 
emailing me directly (of course)...



# Problem 2

Version 7.0.4 has been released on December 17th and been marketed with 
great fanfare the same day.

3 weeks after that date, the update service is still advising 7.0.3 as 
being the latest version.

You understand the consistency issue here /again/.



At the last infra meetings, I have been promised that following Cloph's 
recent (re)adaptations and the new release procedure ensuring the TDF 
update service was up to date, problems of this kind were history of the 
past. A new release came in and, we clearly can't see any sign of 
improvement here with issues of this king being present nearly each time 
a new release comes out.


Being a volunteer and contributor, you can imagine I prefer spending the 
seldom free time I have at other more rewarding things than repeating 
always the same explanation like a parrot for months and receiving 
insulting emails and DMs on my personal social accounts for something 
TDF has been failing at for more than a year [3] :/

This is why, I let you inform, I'll support you again in helping to 
solve these issues **BUT** if a consistency problem of this kind arises 
again this year because of lack of care during the release process, 
being a Chocolatey admin, I'll demote the LibreOffice packages from 
their official status (which means no automation any more) and leave 
them for adoption.


Thanks to everyone wanting to help and fix this issue once and for all!

You cannot imagine from a marketing perspective how much trouble a small 
inconsistency like this one can cause to our reputation (and to products 
based on it...)

When a new release is announced, it should be available in the TDF 
update service nor weeks, nor months after but a few hours afterwards at 
most, that's way enough time to let mirrors sync and to notice a nasty 
bug that, despite our strong QA skills, may have missed our controls.



Regards and take care! =)


[1] Having now officially crossed the 2 millions downloads (taking into 
account -still, -fresh, -help variants). \o/

[2] https://chocolatey.org/packages/libreoffice-still

[3] https://twitter.com/SuisJeFou/status/1189988140842393603


--
William Gathoye
Hyper<hack>tive volunteer for LibreOffice
Proud member of The Document Foundation
CM of LaMouette - French based association promoting ODF and LibreOffice
Consultant Technical Marketer at Collabora
DevOps Engineer at Arawa
Core Committer at Mattermost

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