Just a couple of thoughts--I post them here as this seems to be the place where the discussion goes on.
Donors of $50 (or more) are member of the full 3.* EA programme. This may last more than a year. Does it mean that these members should contribute again $25 (or more) after the first year in order to continue their forum account? It seems not to make much sense to have access to the EA programme without access to the relevant fora.
I'm not judging the decision the reorient available (and limited) resources towards codebase stability; I guess the developers are the only ones who are in a position to make this decision. But it would be interesting to know what the priorities are in order to provide direction to the community effort. Note that donors may be considered to be a volunteer as well when they are documenting and reporting errors found, notably in the EA releases.
Is there a plan for the continuation of the EA programme? Selected functionality of the OOo 3.1 codebase has been backported, but at some point one may consider it is the right time for the next leap forward. That would include decisions on platform support etc. Any suggestions on this topic?
Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 10951 Location: California, USA
Posted: Wed Sep 23, 2009 9:57 am Post subject:
Gust,
While these are nice thoughts, maybe we can cross those bridges when we come to them? Frankly, one of the reasons we pushed this out was that Apple's Snow Leopard release is clearly going to cause a huge amount of engineering work for me. I am already buried by the handful of bugs that you have found and I won't be surprised if other users find more.
My time needs to be spent working on a fixing the critical bugs that you and others are finding in the new Mac OS X release so that NeoOffice is stable. We are not even thinking about upgrading to OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 at this time as I physically cannot do it.
While these are nice thoughts, maybe we can cross those bridges when we come to them? Frankly, one of the reasons we pushed this out was that Apple's Snow Leopard release is clearly going to cause a huge amount of engineering work for me. I am already buried by the handful of bugs that you have found and I won't be surprised if other users find more.
My time needs to be spent working on a fixing the critical bugs that you and others are finding in the new Mac OS X release so that NeoOffice is stable. We are not even thinking about upgrading to OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 at this time as I physically cannot do it.
Thanks for the reaction. My actual policy is to report whatever bug I find, I understand that this contributes to the priorities you identify (stability, particularly under 10.6) although it adds to your workload as well.
And that there is no current plan for future EA editions--that's a genuine answer as well.
Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 10951 Location: California, USA
Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2009 6:42 am Post subject:
FYI. I split out the previous posts into a new topic. While I think that there are still more bugs that we will find on Snow Leopard, I think we can use this topic for donors to discuss what features we should look at merging from OpenOffice.org 3.1.1.
I admit that I am a bit worried about doing a full upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 as the OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 upgrade was very painful and we were stuck fixing a large number of OpenOffice.org crashing bugs and .doc file import/export bugs. Since hundreds of thousands of lines of OpenOffice.org code changed in 3.1 to support anti-aliased line drawing, I have this feeling that upgrading to OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 would introduce a whole new set of bugs into NeoOffice.
So, my thinking is that a safer approach would be for donors to list the feature changes in OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 that they have found valuable. Then, when I get time, I can investigate if the code changes for the feature change requires a full upgrade or can be backported.
If we can find a few key features that we can backport, we could look at doing a NeoOffice 3.0.2 release that contains those backported features (like how we NeoOffice 3.0.1 contains backported native file locking code).
Are there any new or improved features in OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 that we should be looking at?
I admit that I am a bit worried about doing a full upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 as the OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 upgrade was very painful and we were stuck fixing a large number of OpenOffice.org crashing bugs and .doc file import/export bugs. Since hundreds of thousands of lines of OpenOffice.org code changed in 3.1 to support anti-aliased line drawing, I have this feeling that upgrading to OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 would introduce a whole new set of bugs into NeoOffice.
While I respect the enormous difficulties in moving to a much-changed codebase, I am thinking this is a medium-term option only. I would presume that at some point, NeoOffice would have to (keeping up with the Joneses) adapt to an OpenOffice 3.3 or 3.4 or 4.0 codebase..
I can imagine Patrick cringe at reading this, so I would suggest doing a light upgrade to NeoOffice 3.0.2 in a couple of months and let Patrick get a long rest before contemplating the long term future .
That said, the features I am most interested in are:
* new chart options
* dragging with graphics instead of dotted lines.
* formula hot hints
Furthermore, this one has been requested a lot of times already:
* subtle highlighting _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 10951 Location: California, USA
Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2009 6:02 pm Post subject:
ovvldc wrote:
Furthermore, this one has been requested a lot of times already:
* subtle highlighting
I actually remember the opposite. I few people liked it, but in the last Early Access, there were some users that complained very forcefully that OpenOffice.org's light highlighting made the text underneath it nearly impossible to read so I had to restore the OpenOffice.org 2.x code.
Furthermore, this one has been requested a lot of times already:
* subtle highlighting
I actually remember the opposite. I few people liked it, but in the last Early Access, there were some users that complained very forcefully that OpenOffice.org's light highlighting made the text underneath it nearly impossible to read so I had to restore the OpenOffice.org 2.x code.
Or, in Calc, the highlighting was so light that you couldn't tell what/if you had highlighted
I'm not fond of the XOR black or whatever it is, but (un)fortunately it turned out to be far more useable than what the OOo engineers came up with.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Yes, subtle highlighting's pretty much only clearly visible if you have selected a custom dark colour in the Appearance prefpane (in which case it looks pretty good).
Joined: Jul 05, 2005 Posts: 642 Location: North West England
Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2009 1:31 am Post subject:
I guess you would already be planning to look at the changes and identify as a priority those which are essentially bug fixes. I think they ought to come before enhancements - though I recognize that there isn't always a totally black and white distinction. Also some enhancements might just be so key that they would have to be included.
Apart from those general thoughts I haven't got much specific to offer. I'll go on giving it some thought.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 8:02 pm Post subject:
Also, think about whether there are any of the Sun/OOo engineered extensions that may be worthwhile trying to see if they can be backported. I've seen the MySQL connector mentioned recently, but I don't know if it's really that much in demand...I think there are JDBC workarounds that aren't much of a problem since we already have a JVM always loaded
Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 10951 Location: California, USA
Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 8:11 pm Post subject:
To add on to Ed's comment, if donors can identify very specific features from OpenOffice 3.1.1 that they would like to see in NeoOffice, the more quickly we can determine if backporting is feasible.
The tricky part is to get as specific as possible. For example, "all of the Writer improvements in OpenOffice 3.1.1" really means backport all of Writer while "the fixes for bug X when opening .doc files" is very specific and is much easier for us to try to backport.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 8:18 pm Post subject:
And for those on the more technical angle...
To implement that "wonderful" new antialiasing feature in later versions of OOo, the Sun engineering team changed hundreds of thousands of lines of code including a lot within the core "VCL" module. In my opinion, this is a very invasive and potentially destabilizing change for something that is not very relevant to Neo (as we have always had antialiased fonts and, in the end, prefer to use the Mac OS X antialiasing instead of reinventing the wheel). I guess it's good I'm not an engineering manager over in Hamburg as I would have never allowed such a change to be undertaken, especially for a "point" release.
Instead, we're looking at "backporting" individual specific features as we believe it will allow us to maintain a more stable product with the consistent kerning etc. we've strived to maintain over the years
(as we have always had antialiased fonts and, in the end, prefer to use the Mac OS X antialiasing instead of reinventing the wheel)
They are anti-aliasing lines/vector graphics now, too, right? Not that I feel the need to vote for that, but that would explain the need to change so many lines (that, and "Firefox engineering syndrome"--where doing everything you possibly can yourself, avoiding the OS's pre-existing functions at all costs, is seen as the highest goal)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
All times are GMT - 7 Hours Goto page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7Next
Page 1 of 7
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
Forum FAQ
Search
Usergroups
Profile
Private Messages
Log in
.
.
