My statistics:
A little bit more statistic:
Since 2011 I reported 377 bugs for Base - my special part of LO…
6 of this bugs haven’t been confirmed by others in this time.
About 130 bugs for Base are still open and set to NEW.
Most of the rest has been fixed, also some were “notabug” or “worksforme” or “duplicate”.
Bug fixing will be faster for Writer. I see this when reporting a bug there - often the fix will appear some days later. Main problem I see is: Bugs, which are a regression, won’t be solved by the people, who introduced the regression with there changing of code. I posted some of this bugs above, which are all “bibisected”. Might be I should test them all with Writer and set a new label: “Writer” instead of “Base” 
.
Definitely do that. No joking.
@mikekaganski : Done it for the last 2 bugs. One of the problems is a special KDE-problem (multiline textboxes). Might be this is the reason why there isn’t happening anything …
IMO, it is death by a thousand cuts. Chip away here and there, and eventually it will be useless or so lame as to be fit for the knacker’s yard.
Unfortunately, no one seems to want to work on the ugly duckling, as the ROI isn’t seen as significant. The code is complex to read and debug and requires an extensive knowledge of the programming paradigms that were used during its creation.
This situation is both intensely desperate and annoying for me personally as I use Base on a daily basis for work. I believe that it was also entirely foreseeable as soon as the majority of commercial development work began to focus on Writer and Calc, and then into bringing LibreOffice “online”, i.e. when it was realized that money might be made out of offering a slimmed down version of basic Writer and Calc functionality that didn’t require a functional interaction with Base. For me, this is where I have an issue with the ecosystem arguments that are supposed to lead to benefits to the “entire LO project” and the alleged trickle down affect. Commercial resources are naturally targeted towards developments that are intended to meet one’s business objectives. If those objectives rule out by default any Base functionality, it is only a matter of time before the ugly duckling gets left stranded by the wayside.
Huh?
I have a friend, a school teacher from Germany, Andreas Heinisch, who has made hacking on LibreOffice his hobby. He often asks me to review his changes, or to advise on a tricky problem, in a random area he is interested at this moment. We sometimes make calls to discuss the code, and once had a hack session on one of LibOCons, where we could share the ways we tackle problems. Over the last years, he made a big impact on Basic in LibreOffice - basically alone. What was his ROI? Do you claim that Basic implementation is an easy-to-grasp area in the codebase?
I see Julien Nabet, another hobbyist, being annoyed by the Base state (he doesn’t seem to be interested in Base personally), spending hours fixing some bugs there.
But I don’t really see the bright Base community - admit it: people interested in Base are in general much more technically competent, as it used to be in IT in general some 40 years ago, or in Linux world even 20 years ago … - I don’t see them getting their hands dirty in code, coming to IRC and asking @hossein (who is mentoring newcomers) to help them set up their development environment, or CCing me to their changes in gerrit, asking for an advise or a review … Whose ROI would be greater, than for people personally interested?
People tend to over-estimate the difficulties, and expect someone else to do the work. The little ROI is only a sign that people interested in a feature are not interested enough. That was reflected somehow in my hope that a paying customer appears.
You know, I myself came to the project this way. I used to be a system administrator in a company working in a construction business. I decided to move it from a commercial office suite to OpenOffice.org, then to LibreOffice; I saw the issues I needed to workaround - creating workplaces, templates, teaching users, I needed to know the programs better than them … and I started by filing bugs, then triaging, and after some time, I got brave enough to start patching. And then I was noticed by my current employer, and became a full-time paid LibreOffice developer. I have a right to say it it doable.
- Please tell me, exactly when was it so, that the work on Base wasn’t primarily driven by commercial interests. As I said, unfortunately I don’t see a single person, who would be interested in Base themselves, who would either hire someone, or do the work themselves. I claim that it was from the start something “just for a checkmark”, to match a competitor’s offering repertoire.
- Please tell me, where did you read / hear about this fictional “offering a slimmed down version of basic Writer and Calc functionality”. Please show me that offline package made by any community member (Collabora, or CIB, or Allotropia, or …)? You mention Online. Then look at the evolution of the Online. Yes, it started by only offering Writer and Calc functionality. But then, Impress was added; then Draw; then we added support for macros, Math … the ultimate goal is to provide as complete set of functionality as possible. Honestly, what you wrote is so untrue (and I feel it personally).
Base is used in Mail Merge. Base is used in Bibliography. Both are required. Bibliography was improved ~recently: see What is Miklos hacking – Bibliography improvements in LibreOffice Writer and What is Miklos hacking – Bibliography improvements in LibreOffice Writer: refer to a specific page ; Mail Merge saw a big rework some earlier (I believe, in LiMux project time; but also later, when I myself worked on MM topics for some our customers). I don’t see how can anyone say there is a plan to cut something off.
Now let me ask a question I have no answer myself. If you put aside the specific set of bugs mentioned by @RobertG in Who destroyed base? - #6 by RobertG above, which were all caused by a massive work on dark theme by a single developer - @caolan - during 7.5 cycle, which, as any new development, indeed created its trail of regressions, and which I am sure will be fixed - was Base in a really better shape at any point? My suspicion is that it is not a “death by a thousand cuts”, but rather, a frustration from seeing the part being in basically the same state, while other parts evolved. It might be sad. But I didn’t even see a clear description of the specific problem that caused this thread in the first place, which e.g. @RobertG asked for.
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After thinking about Mike’s repeated comments here that LO needs funding for base, it occurred to me this morning what might be going on:
There is someone who is funding LO development, e.g for Calc, Writer, etc, but who is deliberately not funding Base development.
Now, who would do that sort of thing, or why???
Well, Oracle for example might do that sort of thing.
Hear me out. It might be in Oracle’s interest to be able to use some of the LO open source suite, but they wouldn’t want LO to ever compete with their database tools which are the core of their business.
Obviously if they are doing this, they would be funneling the money to LO in a way that LO doesn’t really know where the money is coming from.
And if you recall, when Oracle paid all of that money for Sun Microsystems, where Open Office was developed, they probably thought they were getting rights to Open Office and also to MySQL. But they lost both of these key sources! So they are probably pissed and working to re-gain what they lost somehow.
Anyway Base is so bad now that it barely works. It’s like someone purposely tried to destroy it I think.
Call me a nut, but that’s my thoughts on this subject.
Feed most of LO, but starve Base! What a great way to kill base.
Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEP99RZd8Tc
Very interesting discussion! I have learned a lot from this. Perhaps it is time for some of us, who tried Base but found it too difficult, or who might have wanted to use Base but were warned away from it by others who had tried it, to start a fund of some sort, hopefully “matched” by some larger public-interest group (ODF, are you listening?) that could help to pay developers to repair, update, and renew the Base software.
I use Calc for many things (large data sets with calculations and graphs based on the raw data and the calculations), but there have been many times when I thought of uses for a simple database. Last year, I actually tried to use Base for a simple inventory-type of database. After setting up the format (with difficulty and several re-starts) and entering about half of the data (tediously!), I just gave up. The disadvantages of the current Base certainly seem to outweigh the potential advantages. This should be changed.
I have no clue what has been broken in recent versions. I’m a heavy user of Base. All my forms, some of them rather complex, do work with LO 24.2.
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LOL.
Basically, it’s complete conspirological %censored%. What happens is just a clear reflection of what paying userbase needs most. Commercial companies are simply not interested in personal database solutions. They pay for what they use. They don’t pay for what they don’t use.
One needs to have a very specific mindset, to invent this “strange” argument. OK, one evil corporation decided to destroy a part of a product - imagine how? by paying development in other parts of the product! Perfect strategy. Let us not notice the fact, that any other company that would happen to need Base, and that would hire any L3 support developer to implement the needed changes, would undo the effect. Let us not notice the fact, that no such interested paying customer appeared in more than a decade of LibreOffice history. Let us just invent attractive theories of villains plotting their dark plans of destruction, without even describing the problem clearly (which was mentioned at least three times already here: in reply #6, reply #18, and now in reply #21).
@Villeroy : If forms have been created and text controls shouldn’t be designed in 3D (haven’t designed so) and fonts for the controls aren’t set to default height you don’t recognize a difference between LO 7.4.7.2 and LO 24.2.
And if you are using Linux with KDE please don’t use multiline textboxes. I don’t use this kind of boxes in most of the forms so the bug doesn’t appear for me, but background of multiline textboxes won’t be shown with KDE and content wont be refreshed.
So: Using Base isn’t the main problem. Creating of forms, which will show the design I want, is a problem.
By the way: When creating databases for other people and they ask how they could help I always answer: Donate for TDF and write “Base support” as reason for the donation.
I always start LO with SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen because gtk is even worse. My productive databases need to run on Windows where all this bling-bling seems to be more stable. Form controls work almost perfectly under Windows, and they look always the same.
format_textbox.odt (27.7 KB)
Both controls of your document will be shown here (LO 7.5 or newer, KDE) without background. So if I switch in a database to next row I will see the content of the first row also. Cant read the right content any more.
Older Versions of LO (LO 7.4.7.2) will show the background and 3D also, when set and also the right font size 10 pt, which I could see in the properties for the font.
Have a look of the fonts of your screenshots. In the properties I could see 10 pt by default, but the fonts appear as 8 pt.
See all the bugs I have also posted here at 2024-01-14.
Well, it’s just a formatting issue with work–arounds. It’s far from being “destroyed”. @EasyTrieve is a troll. He does not even mention his OS, let alone any concrete issue.
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Maybe here:
BTW, I’ve reported lots of Base bugs over many years:
NONE of them have been fixed! A few years ago I just stopped trying this approach.
But now there are many new Base bugs. I thought it couldn’t get worse, but it has. I haven’t even reported a single one of the new bugs to Bugzilla because NONE of the others I ever submitted ever got worked on, so what’s the point? Angry and sad at the same time!!!
LO Base is … rather was the only decent database front end available on Linux. Now there is none.
I think the LO policy of accepting money to work on particular parts of LO is foolish. Any money that comes should be to work on all of LO or the money should not be accepted.
As to those of you who think Larry Ellison would not ever do this sort of thing, well I say to you don’t be naive. He isn’t a billionaire for no reason. He didn’t buy a whole island for himself just out of kindness. He is a shrewd guy, and a real shark.
For a brief time I worked at Sun Microsystems as a contractor writing software. When Larry paid billions to buy Sun what he got was the buildings in Mountain View and some of the customers and the team at that time. Sure that was worth something, but what he probably thought he was going to get was Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice. But each of them he lost: Java leaked out to Google, OpenJDK and many others, MySQL to MariaDB (including the man who mostly wrote MySQL), and OpenOffice to LibreOffice. Sun’s SparkStation hardware to my knowledge never survived the CPU wars. So Larry didn’t get what he thought he was getting for his 7.4 billion dollars!
A relational database is a key part of data processing that’s been with us for 70 years. I’ve been working with databases since the late '70s where I worked at Hughes Aircraft on a mainframe using ISAM with EasyTrieve as the front end. Anyone who doesn’t understand how important this component of data processing is, is really missing something big (literally). For example, most of the web has MySQL underneath it via WordPress. Even this forum runs on a huge database!
For LO not to insist that Base remain a solid component of LO is very foolish I think.
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I had a look at some of your issues and added comments namely 108471, 108547, 107788 and 105039.
Looking at your screenshot, I can hardly spot any issue that has not been around since 2005 when “the Base component” had been added to OpenOffice.org. Yes, there are UX issues, poorly written help files and bad defaults but they have been around sincec decades. Nobody destroyed Base in recent versions.
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@EasyTrieve : Screenshot only shows all open bugs. I could also find resolved bugs reported from you: 16 bugs special written for component Base.
By the way: I could find 378 Base-bugs I have reported. Only 127 aren’t solved at the moment…
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