[laurent123456]

All these commits are so strange. They are all useless "clean up" commits yet they are not done by a bot, there's someone manually making these changes every few days, almost every day actually.

Don't know if he's really trying to make the project seem active, or trying to score a certain number of commits, or if he's just really passionate about cleaning up that codebase all by himself.

[yifanl]

Mostly to me, it shows the importance of a sane lint/format step in the pre-commit hook, it prevents engineers spending an near-infinite amount of time on this type of cleanup.

[yankput]

It doesn’t look malicious, it seems he is randomly looking and fixing the codebase and the ASF lets him because who cares.

[pests]

Does the ASF let him? Do they even have the power or jurisdiction to be making these types of decisions for open office?

[Allamande]

As an programmer with OCD, I understand this maintainer. A lot of times I tidy up old code while trying to remember how something was done.

Also, I read a lot of the diffs and even a bit of the dev mailing list, development is as slow as it gets but there is new code being commited.

[foldr]

I don't see anything particularly strange about them. This recent commit, for example, fixes some typos and changes some formatting a bit. HN seems to be taking a very conspiratorial turn in its thinking recently.

https://github.com/apache/openoffice/compare/d98be9a24613ebe...

[alright2565]

Are there so few bugs and issues in OpenOffice that, for months, the most pressing matter is to fix the incorrect use of "its" in comments?

I mean this person is German (their Github bio). Even if they're not a programmer, why don't they instead take the time to translate some of the many german source files to english, like Libreoffice did back in 2013[1]?

[1]: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2013/02/07/the-docu...

[foldr]

Everyone knows that Apache's OpenOffice is barely maintained. That's not a reason to attribute nefarious motives to the person making these commits. This whole thread is going a bit bonkers making unfounded accusations about this particular individual.

[alright2565]

I'm sorry, I missed the important context here.

Yeah I don't think anyone is doing anything nefarious here, and I definitely don't want to accuse anyone of acting in that way. I have my own weird hobbies.

I still don't think it's in the project's interest to have these changes merged in, they just confuse the history & make it harder to track down relevant context.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Unless they're being paid to, the obvious answer is "this is what they felt like working on"