Y'know, it's funny, when I wrote my last piece about OpenOffice, I hadn't even used most of the applications that come with it, just the text editor and the calculator, the two oldest, most heavily used parts of the package. Recently I tried out the database, just for educational purposes (mostly), working my way through this nice little tutorial. The author mentioned a couple hiccups, but nothing serious, and people are using it, and it is after all a 2.0, so I figured, how bad could it be?

The answer: really, really bad. Nothing works, constant crashing, data loss, strange hangs. I found myself learning to do an operation (make one change on a form, eg), save everything under a new name, quit all OO applications (including all instances of the "quickstarter"), restart OO, open the latest version of the db, test it carefully, and start rolling back through the versions if I noticed dataloss. Once confidence develops that the last change didn't break it, I'd feel ready to try another. How much of this is necessary? Who knows. I feel like a dog that keeps being randomly kicked, and develops a wide variety of aversions, resulting in twists and turns and bizarre behavior. I read that it's mostly a developer annoyance, and things are "rock solid" once your forms etc. are in place, but gosh almighty, how would anyone know? It's not release quality, not for anyone, it's not beta, I don't think it's even alpha. I don't even feel good ranting about it, I just feel sorry for the developers whose names got associated with it. But my heart truly goes out to those trying to get work done in this environment. I'm so sorry. I know that no words of mine can help you, but my thoughts and my heart are with you. May 2.0.1 arrive soon and resolve the worst of your troubles.

On the sunny side, the #1 rated bug I wrote about last time got closed, so at least there's turnover in the bug database.