I'm still getting used to this policy. I am also wondering why, in this new world, the severity options "Idea" and "Feature Request" are still available in BZ... _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 4:48 pm Post subject:
Please; let us know any organization ideas you may have to make this all work The basic problem is that we've seen an increasing load of "bugs" that really aren't "bugs" but more "it doesn't work like I want it to" kind of requests...how do we better allow these requests to be tracked? How do we best resolve them without ticking people off and while allowing support personnel to file feature requests away?
I don't know myself, so I've been introducing resolutions as a stopgap. We really don't feel comfortable fielding bug requests that, realistically, we know we will never have the time to address. What's the best resolution?
Joined: Nov 21, 2005 Posts: 1285 Location: Witless Protection Program
Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 5:33 pm Post subject:
ovvldc wrote:
I'm still getting used to this policy. I am also wondering why, in this new world, the severity options "Idea" and "Feature Request" are still available in BZ...
Hmmmm,
Maybe so there is a way to (politely) CLOSE these items that current resources do not allow time and effort for?
Seems like people will keep mis-using Bugzilla for Feature Requests -
these "options" provide a way to (Politely?) handle them.
I'm still a bit puzzled.
What part of: "NeoOffice is an Mac AQUA Port of OOo" don't people understand?
- It is NOT a NEW program, with new features.
- It is NOT a complete redesign of a previous Program/Idea/Whatever.
- It is an All-in-one Office Suite program.
The Draw routines are commonly called by Impress and Writer. Impress uses the Writer routines for text, and so forth. The core routines are used by all modules. It works.
-- NO, it can't be run, or broken up, as individual modules
- IF you want new features and/or Designs,
-- PLEASE post your requests at OpenOffice.org Issuezilla (then be prepared to ... wait. )
- It may never be a 100% Mac application.
The base code is just to large to upgrade to native Mac designs, Human Interface Guidelines and such.
It is build on the shoulders of Giants who have worked hard to provide a Free, stable, usable, cross platform, Office Suite for the folks who can't afford to keep sending money to Microsoft.
+ IT DOES provide a "more" Mac Aqua/native version of OOo to run on your Mac.
+ It's Free, and it's available now
+ It fairly MS Office document compatible.
It may never be 100% compatible as previous Office documents were proprietary and never publicly documented. (I'm not sure even MS knows/understand previous formats completely )
Philip (RFE's? Requests For ... Everything? )
/. "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". -- Albert Einstein
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 7:30 pm Post subject:
Well yes, I see all your points...but to be fair there is an "Enhancement" category in BZ that's been there from the initial install so yes it's totally tempting for people to dump RFEs in there.
I agree with Patrick and others that enhancements should be "closed"...when I login to look at my issues and unassigned issues I really want to see true bugs and crashes that poke out at me. It helps Patrick and I to allocate our time to those things that are the highest priority, the real problems with what we've written
That said, I would also like to track enhancement requests so they don't get lost in the black recesses of the fora (even if we may not get to enhancements, well, ever...)
I'm hoping that perhaps "closed/feature request" might serve the purpose of both making it clear that the "bug" really requires us to enhance the underlying nature of OOo and that, while we aren't planning on doing it at this time, it is noted. The point here being that if anyone ever wants to find all the feautre requests all we need to do is to query for that single resolution state to find all of them; at the same time we keep the "Open" or "Reproducible/not assigned" bugs reserved for those things that are truly known problems with what we've shipped.
The forums too are not a place where we can reliably track "enhancement" requests. They should be in a database somewhere, but they don't belong as "active" issues in BZ according to how we currently use (or, more precisely, "interpret") that system.
I'd like to tag onto Ed's comment here. To date, nearly all of the engineering work has been done by Ed and I. We both know the limits of what two engineers can do and while on some occasions I think we've exceeded even our own known limits, we know that changing the core OOo code requires an order of magnitude increase in the number of full-time developers that NeoOffice has.
Translated into terms that we all can understand, to start changing the core OOo code means we have to hire full-time software engineers at market prices and provide all those wonderful benefits that real employees expect. Simply put, 6 engineers in the California costs about $1,000,000 in salary, employer taxes, and health benefits and that is if we don't provide offices for any of these people.
Neither Ed nor I have a $1,000,000 burning a hole in our pockets. This amount of money is what your average startup tries to get venture capital investors to front.
What this means is that the scope of NeoOffice is not going to change no or likely ever unless other people and/or organizations either fund such efforts or write the code themselves.
On a small scale, this has been done already in two cases: the Office 2007 Word document support was funded and developed by Novell and the Neo 2.1 Akua icons were developed by a small group of volunteers independently.
Ed and I continue to commit to providing a freely downloadable native version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X. But if others want to take it to the next level, we are going to leave such projects for others to fund and lead.
Is it a coincidence that OpenOffice 2.1.1 (a.k.a. OpenOffice 2.2) comes out the same week you fully release NeoOffice 2.1? Not that I'm paranoid (is that what they're saying about me now?*) but I think I remember this happening last time with the aqua beta release too - it's almost as if they're determined that NeoOffice doesn't have the same version number as the current X11 version...
Oh, and any idea (since I'm being asked this already by the version-hungry folk I've been feeding Neo 2.1 to) when NeoOffice 2.1.1 (a.k.a. v2.2) is likely to hit the streets? Maybe, since NeoOffice has things that OpenOffice doesn't have yet, you could release it as NeoOffice 2.3 and see what happens
Joined: Apr 25, 2006 Posts: 2315 Location: Montpellier, France
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 11:29 am Post subject:
OpenOffice.org 2.2 was originally scheduled for release on February 27 (on the day of the Early Access release), but was delayed several times. I don't think they intended to release it right after our new release, and the 2.1 EA release date wasn't chosen to match the OOo 2.2 release either. So I'd say it's just a coincidence.
OpenOffice.org 2.2 was originally scheduled for release on February 27 (on the day of the Early Access release), but was delayed several times. I don't think they intended to release it right after our new release, and the 2.1 EA release date wasn't chosen to match the OOo 2.2 release either. So I'd say it's just a coincidence.
Joined: Nov 21, 2005 Posts: 1285 Location: Witless Protection Program
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 2:11 pm Post subject:
Thank you Pavel,
Yoxi, The 2.2 release has been scheduled, and delayed, for a while.
So "I" would say - No, it was not done in spite.
In fact, they has been much discussion that the releases were being scheduled to fast to allow necessary QA. I think things are moving to a happy medium now. Fast enough to keep the public interest, slow enough to allow the developers and testers to do a complete job.
Lots of effort has gone into OOo 2.2 and it looks like it will be an excellent release for all. Check out the 2.2 Release Notes to see some of the fixes/updates/and Code clean-ups. Note:
Quote:
hr39
osl[in|de]crementInterlockedCount(): don't use "lock" prefix on single processor, single core, non HT machines
hr38
Clean up obsolete files in binfilter. Additionally strip all line which start with the //STRIP001 and //auto strip markers. Removes ~1200 files, and ~1.5 million lines from binfilter.
Some statistics (including two ealier clean up CWSs by rt and by me):
SRC680 m177 hr38
Disk usage (source only): 148 MBytes 75 MBytes
Files: 6896 4998
Lines: 3.53 million 1.71 million
Compiled files (wntmsci10): 2253 1827
Comp. time (wntmsci10, f. local): 3:58:30 2:35:59
This will not be the last clean up CWS, because there are still 129 object files which don't export symbols, thus are no longer needed. This means we can kill an estimated 300 hundred more files from binfilter.
found at the end of the release notes.
These updates will benefit the entire OOo community and I offer my extended PRAISE to all involved.
<Thinking outloud> - Wonder when NeoOffice can update to the 2.2 code base.
Looks like a lot of Impress, Calc, BASE!, timing problems, and more have been fixed.
Sure - it will take a bit of time for the "dust to settle" after both projects code releases.....
<OH! did I say the Out loud?!? >
Philip ( Quote: "Just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean that "they" aren't out to get you!" )
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 8:54 pm Post subject:
For NeoOffice it means nothing.
We have an independent release mechanism which we follow. There are no plans to change this. It takes about 3-4 months of engineering to mate with each "upgrade" of the OOo code since their Windows engineers keep changing things that, at this level of product maturity, should be stable as a rock.
If you're infected with versionitis go use OOo. That's why it's there.
Our focus is on stability and features. Not versions for the sake of versions.
Joined: Nov 21, 2005 Posts: 1285 Location: Witless Protection Program
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 10:38 pm Post subject:
Oh ed, Ed, ED,
That is not the ... correct/desired answer we wanted.
True - it's much more truthful/realistic/whatever answer.
I think it's better this issue was answered now. Now we can all go back to ... waiting for iPhones?!?
I'm sorry that I could ... Not contain myself - I just had to ask.
I fully understand the Outstanding Development policy by the NeoOffice developers.
I have complete faith in Patrick and Ed. I know that the wait will be worth it.
Philip ( will have to be content with the pretty ... Akua icons! )
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 10:58 pm Post subject:
Well as of now we have no plans to go beyond 2.1 at all. With the dangerous mutex policies being bandied about on the gsl OOo developer's list as of late, I'm more than perfectly happy to stay on a version without the OOo "improvements" for years. No single Windows engineer is remotely qualified to begin to assess the ramifications of changing threading requirements of a graphics library on a fundamental level. It took years to get this solid already; now that they're changing it for no other solid reason (other than it doesn't match what Win32 wants) tracking their "upgrades" will do nothing but waste our time reengineering around their mistakes.
Any time someone replaces something that's been unchanged for over 5 years for no other good reason than "it's not the way Windows works!" or "locking is the problem!" is a solid warning flag to beware. Rip out a profiler and experiment scientifically to find where the bottlenecks are; stop introducing clever garbage that "speeds" up things for Windows users and hurts everyone else.
I have no respect for the poor engineering coming out of OOo and have less of a desire to expend the effort to identify and remove it from our otherwise mostly stable product.
Jolly good - I was kind of kidding about the coincidence/paranoia thing, actually. It's useful to have some more of the background to what's in the 2.2 update - and why NeoOffice might steer shy of it for now.
Well as of now we have no plans to go beyond 2.1 at all. With the dangerous mutex policies being bandied about on the gsl OOo developer's list as of late, I'm more than perfectly happy to stay on a version without the OOo "improvements" for years.
This means openoffice.org > 2.1 upgrades are not scheduled to be integrated in neooffice at all?
f. _________________ eadem sed non eodem modo facere
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The basic problem is that we've seen an increasing load of "bugs" that really aren't "bugs" but more "it doesn't work like I want it to" kind of requests...how do we better allow these requests to be tracked? How do we best resolve them without ticking people off and while allowing support personnel to file feature requests away?
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