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In regards to your observations on updates/upgrades, Well put Tom,

If I may add, Every now and then when I click "Shut down" on my new windows 7 machine (which I 
absolutely loath)  I get a message "DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING....INSTALLING UPDATE 1 OF XXX"
(I know all about turning windows updates on and off but that is not the issue.)

This last happened yesterday afternoon as I was leaving work. ---- Installing update 1 of 11. it 
took 17 minutes to download and install the 11 updates which it claimed were all security updates 
????????????
(I keep asking why but not even microsoft knows why.) (anyone who thinks windows is wonderful is 
ignorant of the obvious.)

However when I finally did get to go home I fired up my laptop and did some more work on a document 
I was working on before leaving work.
I DO NOT HAVE ANY MICROSOFT OFFICE PROGRAMS ON MY MACHINE  I use only LO, however, when I tried to 
do a spell check on the doc I was working on spell checker said "OK no Errors"
But I knew there were errors. I opened a few other documents in both writer and calc and the same 
result. Spell checker failed every time. Now I last used spell checker and it worked fine just 
before the windows updates.

After much testing and reinstalling LO  3.5.2.2 still no spell checker.

I uninstalled LO again and this time reinstalled an older version (3.4.4) and suddenly spell 
checker worked fine again.
So without uninstalling version 3.4.4,  I re-installed 3.5.2.2 over the top and guess what..... 
everything is fine again.
Why would a windows security update (1 of 11) suddenly make LO spell checker fail and require the 
installation of an older version to get it back?

The same thing has happened on a number of other company laptops running LO on windows operating 
systems, both XP and Win7 and all immediately after a windows update.
In all cases installing a different version and then re-installing the latest version again fixed 
the issue.

How many Grannies would know to install an older version of LO and re-install the latest version 
every time Microsoft issues faulty automatic updates?

By the way, being a grandfather I take offence when grannies are referred to as being somehow 
technologically illiterate. And I'm still a programmer ...among other things :-)

Bruce Carlson
Business Systems Analyst / IT Projects Manager 


bruce.carlson@nepean.com 
Website: www.nepeangroup.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Davies [mailto:tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, 17 April 2012 10:35 AM
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Mac OS X 10.4 Check for Updates Glitched

Hi :)
Updates and upgrades are different things although i guess there is some
overlap in the middle.

"Frequent updates and bug fixes are a mark of quality" which is odd really,
when you really think about it.  What it means to me is that the program, as
sold to customers, was so broken and easily exploited that it needs a whole
load of extra work to be added later.

Note that the updates for MS Office are almost entirely "Security
updates".  There is almost never any mention of updates increasing
functionality nor to add extra features.  Similarly for Windows, for Adobe
products, Oracle stuff and so on.

LO and other OpenSource programs tend to be written with security as a top
priority.  Over the past year or so there have only been about 2 times when
upgrades have been about solving security issues.  Those security issues
were pre-emptive as there didn't appear to be any threats out in the
wild.  All the rest of the upgrades have been about adding functionality and
simmering the code down to make it smaller and faster.

MS Office only upgrades once every few years.  Four years between 2003
and 2007, then another 3 before 2010.  Each install is a major pita.  Everything
changes.  Compatibility issues with older documents.  Several rounds of
updates and reboots.  Settings and all that tend to be lost by default.

Installing an OpenSource product  is easier as it keeps the old settings and
stuff and still reads old documents the same.  If you don't like the newer one
then reinstalling the older one back over the top is easy. Regards from Tom
:)


--- On Tue, 17/4/12, precutcolours@mailcan.com
<precutcolours@mailcan.com> wrote:

From: precutcolours@mailcan.com <precutcolours@mailcan.com>
Subject: [libreoffice-users] Re: Mac OS X 10.4 Check for Updates Glitched
To: "Users LibreOffice" <users@global.libreoffice.org>
Date: Tuesday, 17 April, 2012, 0:10

Well thank you Tom.  I know beacoup info about release cycles, open vs.
proprietary, and user configs.  I seek to help grandmas.

Updates item [is] pointless

When Libre app reports no update to grandma, but I counter-invite to Libre
org's home page news, grandma gets confused.  Why does the app say
different than the web site?  Microsoft Office update doesn't behave so, nor
Windows Update.  The patches listed on Microsoft's web are the patches
one gets in Windows Update.  They are in sync.

Updates tend to be minor patches
LibreOffice doesn't have minor updates very often

Frequent updates and bug fixes are a mark of quality.  Advising people not to
patch bugs is rather poor advice.  Grandma needs a simpler way than full
reinstall.

Minor bugs kill grandmas.  I want minor patches.  I want the menu to tell
grandma about them.

Release cycles seem aggressive enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Release_schedule

OpenSource [keeps user] stuff safely away

User prefs aren't relevant.  The trouble is getting bugs fixed.

A menu tells grandma no update exists, yet I claim to know better, but my
info just means more work, a re-install.  What seems easy to you and me is
very intimidating to grandma esp. when she didn't do the original
install.  Some people did not grow up with computers either for age or
poverty or both.  So she ignores me, or says "manyana," all merely because
there's no one-two click update.  The result is users not keeping LibreOffice
bug-patched.

Next they complain if Calc breaks over something that Excel does perfectly
well, only because they lack a "minor" fix.  After that, they tell others that
LibreOffice "broke on me doing X, so I went back to Excel" etc.

Thanks very much to the team for all the hard work!  Pushing fixes out to
users is a no-brainer, I hope...

--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Faster than the air-speed velocity of an
                          unladen european swallow


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