Thank you, Michael Stahl!

Dear Michael,

Your contributions are legend. Roughly 8,700 commits on master,
spanning the better part of two decades. That will do for starters.
(The rest is lost to OOo history.)

Contributions going back to when the code was still locked into ancient
version control systems and built with dmake, and the future of the
project anybody’s guess. Through Sun, Oracle, Red Hat, CIB, allotropia,
and now Collabora, you kept being there and kept making things better.
That kind of constancy is what made this project a great success and a
deadpan fun place to be.

You have, by any reasonable measure, attained one of the highest
technical achievements possible in LibreOffice: fixing Writer layout
loops. Not one or two, but dozens of them, across years, in code that
most of us open, stare at, and quietly close again. (And it’s not even
written in Haskell.) The fact that you go into the Writer layout engine
and come back with a working fix, repeatedly, suggests either
extraordinary patience or some form of dark magic. Either way, the rest
of us are grateful and silent in awe.

The gbuild migration is one of those efforts whose importance is easy to
underestimate because it worked. You were one of the people who turned
the old dmake build system into something that could actually be
understood and maintained by humans. Several hundred commits to
solenv/gbuild from 2010 onwards, shaping the infrastructure that every
single developer relies on daily. Not glamorous. Absolutely essential.

Your work on the ODF committee and on ODF itself has been substantial.
ODF Wholesome Encryption—AES-GCM authenticated encryption, Argon2id
key derivation, proper metadata hiding—spans multiple releases and
represents exactly the kind of careful, standards-aware security work
that users depend on without ever knowing it exists.

And did I mention seemingly looking at every single CVE report out
there, and reliably distilling them into whatever backport patches
necessary for LibreOffice? Behind the scenes, and highly essential.
(Oh, and you also removed FTP support from LibreOffice, which means we
can all finally stop pretending it’s 1995. And 57k lines of obscure
autodoc code got swapped for a much slimmer and more beautiful doxygen
integration, too.)

And the work keeps coming: Writer cursor fixes, accessibility fixes, ODF
export corrections, security library upgrades. The stream has never
slowed down. And there’s always been a solid stream of input into the
quips file, too. :slight_smile:

4 Likes

who is ?

Michael Stahl, see topic name.

Vielen Dank @thb;
did you update it ?

will you also subtitle all others ? :thinking:
Thanks Bayram for your work
Thank you, Darshan!
Thank you Gülşah
Thank you, Kohei!
Thanks for your service Henry
Thanks for your efforts Pranam
Thanks for your work Ashod
Thanks for your work Miklos
Thank you, Armin!
Thank you, Caolán!
Thank you, Stephan!
Thank you, Sahil!
Thank you, Mohit!
Thank you, Sarper!


FTR …

Starting: Wed Apr 1 10:01:17 UTC 2026
Ending: Wed Apr 1 13:53:37 UTC 2026
Messages: 34