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LibreOffice release builds should offer to send a crash report. Ideally, you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report. Besides that, you can do your own build with debug symbols and get backtraces or debug the program.

At The Document Foundation we are always interested in helping deployments. It is also nice to do writeups for our blog. Let me know, if your organisation needs help: ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org

I recommend to consider our certification program: https://www.documentfoundation.org/certification-program/

I asked about the Maven artifacts and our release engineer will update them later this week.


> you should then create a bug report referencing the crash report

Reducing friction would be nice here - I don't remember encountering the crash log screen, but if you could file a bug report right from that screen, that'd be perfect. A lot of information can be pre-collected at that stage - precise version, build, OS, architecture, processor type, etc. All that'd be left is the "What I was trying to do", my e-mail, and a checkbox if I agree with the privacy policies and if I want to receive e-mail updates about this bug report.

> you can do your own build with debug symbols

It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case - if it's crashing for you, install the debug version and your crash logs will be a lot easier to read.


> if you could file a bug report right from that screen, that'd be perfect

You can file a bug report from a crash report - it prefills all the relevant data. See an example crash report: https://crashreport.libreoffice.org/stats/crash_details/bac2...

"Bug reports for libc.so.6:

File a bug for: Calc Writer Impress Chart Base"

Here is what the dialog says about bug reports: https://git.libreoffice.org/core/+/master/svx/uiconfig/ui/cr...

> It'd be great if the Document Foundation helped distros to offer libreoffice-*-debug packages for this case

I believe most distros have this covered now, some by making use of debuginfod, which downloads symbols on demand: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Debuginfod


Thank you. This is all awesome work. BTW, I didn't know debuginfod existed :-)


Why does libreoffice have such an annoying document recovery mechanism that I can't turn off or modify? It takes like three clicks to cancel that process every time I open a new doc


Have you deactivated Tools - Options - Load/Save - General: Save AutoRecovery information...?


Yes. It still operates after that if I open a document that I didn't shutdown correctly. Many times I just open documents to take temp notes. and some times I shutdown the application with out saving and that document recovery process starts no matter what.


There is this command line option that you could add to your shortcut for launching LibreOffice: --norestore

It will skip the recovery dialog. I use it often when doing QA.


There are existing sites like https://www.goeuropean.org/

Based on the creator of EU Tech Map having an AI-powered advertising company and the mistakes in the entries, I assume the site was populated using LLMs. For example, LibreOffice is incorrectly listed as being closed source, SaaS and paid: https://eutechmap.com/company/libreoffice


For the latest in IRC tech, you can read my blog posts: https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

I wrote the summaries with my own two hands, no LLMs involved.


Thank you! I've bookmarked your website!


One solution is to have a screensharing call with the contributor and have them explain their patch. We have already caught a couple of scammers who were applying for a FOSS internship this way. If they have not yet submitted anything non-trivial, they could showcase personal projects in the same way.

FOSS has turned into an exercise in scammer hunting.


I'm not sure if I follow, are the PRs legitimate and they are just being made to buff their resume, or are PRs malicious?


The patches are not malicious, but the submitters are unable to explain them. We require submitting a non-trivial patch in order for someone to be considered for a FOSS internship. As there is money involved, this attracts scammers now more than ever.


They are becoming AI slop more and more likely in an attempt to buff their resumes by making it look like they contribute to a bunch of open source. Basically low effort low quality submissions for silly things that just waste maintainers time.


Just a guess, but Jitsi having no governance structure outside of 8x8, Inc. might have something to do with it.


It's fixed in https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu/pull/1640 but they haven't cut a release since Dec 2024.


Random grid gotcha that drove me crazy some time ago: due to browser bugs we can't use <img> elements with percentage widths or heights as grid items. The grid cell dimensions get blown out to the ones of the original image. Seen in both Firefox and Chromium. Relevant FF bug is probably https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1857365 '<img> grid item with percentage height, "width: auto", "grid-template-columns: auto", and no track stretching makes column to have the same width of the original image's width' (although someone there claims it works in Chromium).


so if the img has a specific size set in width and height attributes or via css, and that size is not percentile or auto, the problem doesn't exist?

I'm just confused by the "original image's width".


The Firefox bug report has an image that illustrates the issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1857365#c0


not OP but (unless silently edited) they wrote

> "<img> elements with percentage widths or heights"


What you say sounds influenced by the movie Agora: https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2016/03/the-library-of-alexan...


I haven't fully watched that film.

It is definitely influenced by the book Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I feel I read it a hundred times.


Ok, the errors in Cosmos are covered here: https://sciencemeetsfiction.com/2014/06/15/cosmos-follow-up-...

Quote:

Cosmos does not make Hypatia’s death so much a religious issue as an anti-intellectual on, but the truth is that it was actually a political one. A second problem comes when Dr. Sagan links her death to the destruction of the Great Library. In fact, in the final episode of the original Cosmos, “Who Speaks for Earth”, Carl Sagan says, “The last remains of the library were destroyed within a year of Hypatia’s death.”

The problem with this is that the last remnant of the Library of Alexandria were almost certainly destroyed in 391, 24 years before Hypatia’s death, and most of the library was likely destroyed, by accident, centuries earlier.

It sounds strange, but we actually don’t have a very good idea of when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed. As best we can tell, much of it was burned unintentionally when a fire spread through the city during Julius Caesar’s invasion in 48 BC. While the majority of the library may have survived that war, it was almost certainly destroyed in the war between Emperor Aurelian and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra in the 270s AD. This also appears to have been unintentional, as a large part of the city was burned.

What little was left of the library was deliberately destroyed in 391, when Emperor Theodosius I banned Paganism. The remaining repository of books in Alexandria was destroyed along with the Pagan temple it was stored in. [Even this has no evidence as pointed out by Tim O'Neill in the blog comments]

I admire most of Dr. Sagan’s and Dr. Tyson work, but when they characterize Hypatia’s death and the burning of the Great Library as the deliberate (and linked) actions of an anti-intellectual mob, they are simply misrepresenting the history.


Thank you for your detailed reply.


Comment in the issue referring to the wiki page: "note: it needs updates for stuff merged in Sofia".


That's more or less the critique OSE got back in 2013. Ie. if you're going to raise money, why not hire professional designers?


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