Bug report requests for Fedora build of OpenOffice.org software

[David Hollis]

On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 19:40 -0400, Peter Arremann wrote:
> On Tuesday 18 October 2005 19:25, Bob Kline wrote:
> > (Yes, I know it doesn't make any sense for developers
> > to turn down carefully prepared feedback on problems
> > in their software, no matter where it's built.  I'm
> > just passing on what I was told by the OOo team.
> > Sorry!)
> 
> Bob,
> 
> it is very unfortunate that you had to go through this. Most OSS users 
> eventually end up with this problem. 
> 
> For one or another reason a distribution repackages code and then the upstream 
> providers will not help you out. Happened in the past with kde, the kernel, 
> ooo, cdrecord and many many others. 
> 
> There is usually a good reason for what the distributions do - make things 
> look or behave differently, resolve conflicts or fix bugs that aren't fixed 
> upstream yet. The upstream package providers don't like that because they 
> don't appreciate others changing the code and then being asked for help. 
> 
> Unfortunately for the user, since you got the software for free you end up and 
> both sides point fingers at the other, you end up without support. 
> 

The finger pointing aspect from support is certainly not isolated to OSS
alone.  It's extremely common in the commercial world as well (Oh, you
are running with that other piece of software installed??  OOooooh,
that's not a supported combination!  etc).


I can understand their rationale that they can't support the software if
it was built by a different vendor due to the higher exposure nature of
OO, though depending on what the nature of the problem you reported, it
could really be a cop-out.  A bigger issue as I see it for support is
that FC4 is running a fairly dated beta build (1.9.125 looks to be the
most current in updates) and the OO team is currently on RC3 so they may
not want to spend too much time investigating the problem since it could
be very well have been fixed already.

So the question sort of comes down to - with the actual 2.0 release of
OO due out real soon, will new builds be put out for FC4 users or will
they have to wait for FC5?


-- 
David Hollis <dhollis at davehollis.com>
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