I’m writing a book at the moment, for which it’s useful to have Microsoft Word kicking around from time to time. So, I installed an old copy under (the otherwise absolutely fantastic – go buy it now!) Crossover Office so I could check things before they’re sent to the publisher. It’s been working great for a month or two. Until I tried to play around with my regular wine.
Here’s ticket 77817 from the Codeweavers tracking system, which I just filed. Notice two bad design decisions here:
- the broken assumption that it’s a good idea to go looking for replacement dlls randomly, not using the standard cxoffice defaults whenever possible (that have been tested).
- not providing a graphical error message with descriptive text on systems running graphical applications.
This is very bad, because the average Joe using this software isn’t likely to fire it up under strace or a debugger and see why it’s failing and then report that to Codeweavers – they’re just going to think it’s broken. Now I think cxoffice is a fantastic product, but it could be better if it handled this stuff and didn’t just break if a user stuck a file in their home directory. That kind of stuff is what puts some people off using FLOSS and it shouldn’t have to be this way.
Folks,
Can someone patch up cxoffice not to default to looking for dll’s in the current directory?
I’ve been recently playing with getting Google Earth to work under regular wine (I don’t know about cxoffice support thereof) and had an ole32.dll kicking around in $HOME. When I came to launch cxoffice to run Microsoft Word, it spewed a bunch of errors and fired up the debugger (without enough useful output – it just died, no cxoffice error dialog).
I removed and re-installed various bottles and cxoffice before I finally started shouting at it and wound up running the whole thing under strace. I then manually went through the output to see what was getting loaded and found the offending dll that way. In any case cxoffice *should not* do this – it might be something wine does, but cxoffice should not.
Thanks for an otherwise great product. Keep up the good work – and please add an error dialog wrapper so users can /see/ when this happens as the default experience on cxoffice 5.0.1 is “Word started to launch but nothing happened”
Jon.