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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

The one long term open bug that irks me the most is that you cannot properly date-format the x-axis of scatter plots in LibreOffice:

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54132

12 years old. According to the comments, fixing it is discouraged as the code is so "horribly complicated", it would likely cause regressions.

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This does not bode well for my hopes of LibreOffice getting my favorite features from Excel.

Excel code is likely "horribly complicated" behind the scenes as well.

I looked at the openoffice source code 15 years ago .. and stepped back again. But I think LibreOffice systematically refactored a lot of it. It wouldn't hurt asking for it.

Some things are surprisingly easy to implement. Some things would require a redesign, when you are dealing with very old legacy code..

If you just need a spreadsheet and graphing package, gnumeric is a good choice under Linux.

Gotta love it when maintainers are afraid of code they allowed to get merged in.

Maintainers often change (leave/die/hired out/new job).

What one maintainer knew and understood, is often fairy dust/spaghetti to another.

Looks like there was quite a bit of attrition in the early 2010s after Oracle stopped developing their commercial version (and presumably stopped hiring the developers). There's also been people who stuck around, but this was probably a pretty big knowledge drain.

See e.g. https://gitstats.arp242.net/LibreOffice/

And skill level can vary vastly from one maintainer to the next. I suspect this will become a more and more significant problem as time goes on.

Could have been previous maintainers that allowed it, and now the current maintainers are stuck with it.

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