Stable Release Updates types proposal

[Terry Barnaby]

On 03/18/2010 06:28 AM, David Tardon wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 07:58:03AM +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote:
>> Last night I was helping some school kids with a powerpoint presentation
>> they had written. They had, not un-reasoanbly, used FontWork titles.
>> Under F12 with OpenOffice 3.1 it took 3 minutes to load the 10 slide file
>> and about 1 minute between slides. Editing was basically impossible.
>> I had to go back to a F8 system OpenOffice 2.x system to edit the FontWork
>> out. How on earth did this "release" get out (Fedora/OpenOffice ??) ??
>> This is just one of many basic issues I and others have had with Fedora
>> recently.
> 
> And where is your bug report? Anyway, there is no justification for you
> having used the wording that you used ('How on earth did this "release"
> get out (Fedora/OpenOffice ??) ?? This is just one of many basic issues
> I and others have had with Fedora recently.'), because:
> 
> 1. Fontwork objects are 3-D objects, therefore the performance depends
>    on graphic driver, card and so on. I just checked it and it works
>    reasonably well on my machine (6-slide presentation with a fontwork
>    on each slide was loaded in 10 seconds and transition between slides
>    took a second at worst). That means there are users for whom it
>    works without problems.
> 
> 2. This upstream bug: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=58291
>    says someone had similar performance problems with fontwork in OO.o 2.0.
>    That means it's nothing new in 3.1 (and I personally doubt there
>    was much change in this area between 2.3 and 3.1).
> 
> 3. Fontwork is just a very small piece of OO.o. Even if it had as poor
>    performance as you describe on _every_ system, it would hardly be a
>    blocker for release of OO.o and it's absolutely unimaginable it would be
>    a blocker for release of Fedora. That means it can hardly be described
>    as basic issue.
> 
> D.
Ok, the wording is a bit strong but Fedora 12 has let me down on quite
a number of occasions when doing, what I would call, basic user tasks. It
actually failed in the actual presentation as a video would not display on
the projector connected to the laptop (black window).

No bug report as yet, I'm not sure which area is at fault. I suspect an
issue with the ATI graphics driver, Mesa, libdrm, Kernel DRM, X-Server or
its interaction with OpenOffice as Fedora12 has many many issues with
graphics. (X-Server and OpenOffice at close to 100% CPU during delay).
I tried it on 3 different systems all had the same issues. In the end I
went back to Fedora 8 with OpenOffice 2.3 and it worked fine (on the same
hardware). I have filed quite a few bug reports on Graphics and other
issues already, but have had little response. I will try and do so
but I am more and more feeling it may be a waste of time ...
I have said on numerous occasions that a serious look at the Graphics
issues needs to be undertaken. I think a lot of the core issues people are
having are due to bugs in this area ...

Fontwork may be a small part of OpenOffice and I personally haven't used
it. It is however a fairly well known and commonly used feature. Certainly
my and other kids use it at school extensively.

As part of a Fedora release I would have thought that part of the
test schedule would be to load and view some test documents with
openoffice on a set number of platforms (Different graphics chipsets).
This would likely have picked this up ...

Cheers


Terry