The problem of incomplete shutdown is very serious. It can result in damaged and completely lost in-progress work, even though apparently saved, and other damage. The whole problem of shutdown, Quickstarter, and failed auto-recovery is a big ball of snakes that is worthy of a maintenance release all on its own.
With regard to spell-checking, the usual symptom is that suddenly all words are redlined. Having it stop checking probably goes unnoticed more often, as it did for Don. With regard to spell-checking, there is a promise to provide a profile-fix tool for Windows, <https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121930#c96>. That is a bit buried (but look at the issue it is tied to). I will open a separate task for this now. At some point, installation of such a tool should at least be part of the built distribution. So there are three steps: 1. Get the tool out there as something users can install and use. 2. Incorporate the tool in our binary distributions. 3. Fix the shut-down problems we have that are so overwhelming and so damaging to the work of our users. Steps (1) will require QA work and L10N work in order to reach the greatest number of users. English will only work for 45% of our users. It should work better for end users than the instructions that are being provided repetitively each time someone stumbles on this and manages to report it. This is clearly a triage situation. We need something now, we need something about best practices, such as having Quickstarter OFF by default at least on Windows, and also doing something about auto-recovery failures. And we can't wait for laborious software fixes for which there is no foreseeable developer availability and then production of subsequent full-binary distributions. Speaking of triage, the targeting of Windows reaches 87% of our users based on platform downloads. Remedies there are assisted by the fact that cmd.exe (the console processor) and command-line utilities are available on all versions of Windows that AOO supports. In addition, every install of AOO includes a functional version of Python in the OpenOffice 4 code. Accomplishing the provision of side-car utilities for other platforms will depend on committers who are devoted to those platforms stepping forward. - Dennis PS: The 4.1.2-patch1 Hotfix will roll to general distribution in the next 24-48 hours. We have English language covered and there is provision for more L10N localization. However, the only one completed at this time is Nederland (nl, Dutch) for the Windows version. A Deutsch (de, German) one is in the works. To get better coverage, the priority additional L10N-s should be French, Italian, and Spanish. That gets us to 75% of the users by downloaded languages. To get to 90% add Japanese, Russian, Polish, (Dutch), and Portuguese. Chinese would be a great bonus and, of course, we would appreciate any other localizations that AOO enthusiasts and committers provide. > -----Original Message----- > From: Don Lewis [mailto:truck...@apache.org] > Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2016 00:38 > To: ofarr...@iol.ie > Cc: dev@openoffice.apache.org; q...@openoffice.apache.org; > l...@openoffice.apache.org > Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Release 4.2: General Topics > > On 24 Aug, Rory O'Farrell wrote: > > On Wed, 24 Aug 2016 00:01:22 -0700 (PDT) > > Don Lewis <truck...@apache.org> wrote: > > >> Someone should fix the broken spellcheck problem. It generates a lot > of > >> complaints from our users. > >> > > > > The "broken spellcheck problem" seems largely to be caused by over > hasty close-down of the computer before cached files (both hardware and > software caches) are properly written to disk. User education is the > answer - educate them to be patient in closedown and wait for disk > activity to finish before power-off. > > Maybe using fsync() to flush things out faster when shutting down the > app and keeping a backup copy of the config would help avoid the > problem. We shouldn't just silently fail when something is corrupt. > > I've even experienced this myself on my FreeBSD desktop which stays on > 24x7 and has an UPS. It took me quite a while to notice spellcheck > wasn't working. I just thought my spelling was unusually good ;-) > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
