Problems with OpenOffice 2.3.1 on FreeBSD

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

Predrag Punosevac wrote:
> Philipp Ost wrote:
>> O. Hartmann wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Whenever I try to save a document in OO writer, OO gets stuck and I 
>>> have to kill it. The document gets saved, but I never can load it 
>>> again without rendering OO unusuable. Opening M$ Word docs or OO docs 
>>> doesn't matter.
>>
>> I have similar problems with OpenOffice 2.3.1 on FreeBSD/i386 (I'm 
>> running 7.0-PRE as of Dec 23). It's possible to save documents but 
>> exiting OOo hangs and I need to kill it. Firing up OOo once again, 
>> there's this "recovery stuff" which hangs also and eats up CPU time. 
>> Only way out: kill -9 $PID
>> Opening a document via 'File -> Open -> ...' hangs also. .odt or .doc 
>> doesn't matter.
>>
>>
>>> Any ideas? This is a serious situation to me, due to the need of a 
>>> properly working OO :-(
>>
>> No, perhaps using an other word processor (AbiWord, StarOffice). Or 
>> going back to OOo 2.3.0...
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Philipp
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> I am not an OpenOffice user but my 2c about the topic  as  the problem I 
> think underline more serous issue.
> 
> The question is why is OpenOffice 2.3.1 included in the ports three so 
> quickly without making sure that things work properly.
> BSD systems are genuinely known for their stability and code correctness 
> which is why most people decided to use them on the first place.
> Rushing to include new software in the ports three without proper 
> testing is seriously going to damage  usability of the whole OS.
> In my understanding ports tree is supporting stable and the current 
> brunch. I am of the opinion  that  the ports  three  of the  stable  
> branch  should not include  nothing but  the rock  solid and tested  
> software.  The  easiest  way for me to  check if the port is bleeding 
> edge that  is to  try to install the same  software  using binaries. 
> (pkg_add -r) If the binaries do not exist or if the version installed 
> from binaries is older that clearly indicates that the port version is 
> too new to be trusted.
> 
> I personally found out that Xfce4-panel is not compiling properly on 
> stable and also Orage (calendar for Xfce) While
> problems with Xfce4-panel  are not as serious as with Orage (which is 
> not usable in any shape or form on FreeBSD) they are still serious.
> The same packages work flawlessly on the OpenBSD.

The problem is that ports is maintained by volunteers who are mostly 
outside of any kind of freebsd core team.  I think it is unrealistic to 
ask port committers to check anything more than to check that the ports 
build properly.

My personal wish list is that opencascade builds on FreeBSD-7 with the 
new stlport, and that octave-forge not be in its current "IGNORE" state. 
  But I fully appreciate that I must either wait, or help make it happen.

Stephen