It appears to be true. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/activity

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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.

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.

I'm really confused about this. It's the slimmest possible veneer, collapsing upon a cursory browse of the commit history. Why put in the time to update at all?

My guess is possibly one of those "make a commit to an open source repo" to enter things?

Could it be someone is hiding information in there? Could this be steganography? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography