Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2005 2:23 pm Post subject: Updated NeoOffice development plan
As I have mentioned in a few different posts, all of the fundraising efforts from several potential large donors fell apart after the OOo "Cocoa port" announcement at OOoCon 2005. Without such large donors, I could no longer work full time on NeoOffice so I have been looking for paid work.
Well, I found paid work. Starting December 12, I will start a full time software engineering position at a local software company. I will definitely continue working on NeoOffice. However, since I will be working full time, I will only be working on NeoOffice on nights and weekends.
Because of this change, my old 2006 devlopment plan is no longer realistic. So, at this time, here is the current development plan:
1. Fix any remaining major Neo 1.2 Alpha bugs and release Neo 1.2 Beta. The number of major bugs seems to be very small so I expect that I will release Neo 1.2 Beta before New Year's Day, 2006 as I have a week of holiday between Christmas and New Year's Day.
2. Slowly work on getting OOo 2.0.x to build within the NeoOffice build system. In parallel, Ed has said that he will try doing the same on Mactel. Eventually, our goal is to release a Neo 2.0 Alpha release on PowerPC and Mactel. I expect that this work will proceed slowly so most likely we are not going to get a Neo 2. 0 Alpha release out until sometime in the second half of 2006.
One thing that will really help me maximize my development time is bug evaluation. Smokey has been periodically going through each of the unconfirmed bugs, getting the required information to reproduce the bug, and either closing it as an OpenOffice.org bug or assigning it to me if it is reasonably reproducible.
If any of you can help Smokey, even if you only handle a bug or two each month, that will allow me to focus my time on debugging and fixing NeoOffice bugs instead of doing the back-and-forth steps that are usually needed before a bug is reproducible.
Sorry to hear this, but I'm glad you won't have to starve to death. Will see if I can find some spare cycles to help analyze bugs. I think I'll have to move to OpenOffice, because my employer is requiring us to switch to StarOffice8 and the new OpenDocument formats from January.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2005 11:11 pm Post subject:
I'm thankful you were able to continue on it as long as you were I'm planing on plugging away on 2.0 when I dive back in (was busy doing trademark infringement garbage and server maintenance this evening). I'll probably start off on PowerPC myself and then focus on solidifying the bridge code which may need some love. It makes much more sense than burning more time on fixing up the 1.1 code for gcc4/x86.
I also have been somewhat prepping for an "emergency" Mactel build scenario of compiling 1.2 with x86 gcc3. Getting gcc3 itself compiling requires some moderate fixing to the gcc3 sources. Unfortunately, the one I fixed was gcc 3.4 which will suffer from some of the same template linkage issues as gcc4 does on the OOo 1.1 source trees, so I'll need to move back to gcc3.3 and fix that up.
Well, after a stream of obscenity-like utterances and then some tea....
It really sucks for all the users out there..."Team OOo" has shot in the knee the only user-friendly office suite alternative to MS on the Mac....
I'm glad we were able to do some of the critical jumps for the future this summer/fall and get ODF-read support, and I'm glad you've found a position that will keep you solvent, Patrick. I certainly appreciate all the time and effort you've put into this project.
(Hopefully libwpd 0.8.4, which includes significant improvements in WP-Mac import, will be ready in time to make Beta.)
And if you're going to help with the bug triage (please do!!!), please read the Life-cycle of a Bug section of the Bugzilla Guide in the wiki so that you'll set bugs to the correct statuses and can prompt users for the info that really needs to be present before confirming a bug....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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I'm planing on plugging away on 2.0 when I dive back in (was busy doing trademark infringement garbage and server maintenance this evening). I'll probably start off on PowerPC myself and then focus on solidifying the bridge code which may need some love. It makes much more sense than burning more time on fixing up the 1.1 code for gcc4/x86.
