Allen, On Fri, 2011-06-03 at 22:06 -0400, Allen Pulsifer wrote: > > So here is my suggestion: I propose the everyone here head over to the > Apache Incubator and join the proposal as an initial member.
Just so you know, I've been following that thread on the Apache list by reading the archives, pretty much fully, so I have a pretty good idea of what's going on over there. I'll keep this short (but will probably end up being long anyway). It makes zero sense, for whatever reason, to join an entirely different project that someone else (in this case IBM) cares about when we have a perfectly live, vibrant, passionate and fun project to nurture, and that project already exists today. Just because the two projects used to share the same code base in the past doesn't mean anything here. We are different projects now, plain and simple. Suggesting that we somehow owe anything to them just because of the past is, to put it mildly insane, and in some way insulting. And let me put this in practical terms. Managing a project is a big chore. I have hard time keeping up with all these bug reports, patch reviews, helping other hackers, many releases, while at the same time trying to clean up and refactor the code base to modernize the code. Doing that in two projects would basically force me to cut back on that for this project. That would be a terrible disservice to those who believed in TDF and LibreOffice, not to mention that would be against my own will. And we have done some amazing things in the past 8 months, none of which is in the Apache OOo code base (whereever it may be right now). Telling us to forget all that and start from scratch is simply insane. Plus, I've been burned (as you probably know) by the stupid corporate bureaucracy trying to control the project in the past, with OOo project. So I am very cynical about a corporate participant promising to help a project in the future, promising to donate code at some unspecified time in the future. You may say "but Apache is all about individuals". That's probably true, but where are those individuals who are working on IBM's Symphony product right now? Rob claims that they'll be working on Apache's OOo, but none of them are in the discussion right now. I don't doubt Rob's qualification, but I really doubt that Rob will be the one working on the code base. I'm sure he is too busy for that. I would be more comfortable if the individual hackers from IBM were openly speaking up in honest terms. But so far that's not happening. Also, the difficulty working on both projects also applies to the IBM Symphony team. I doubt they'll be working 100% on Apache OOo. So the obvious question is what percentage of their time is spent maintaining the Apache OOo code base? They claimed they'll allocate 35 engineers, but how much time they'll invest remains to be seen. Plus, managing a project is an on-going process; if they just dump some code from Symphony to Apache OOo every now and then without follow-up clean-ups and bug fixes, that wouldn't be called managing & maintaining a product. That's just code dump. And lastly, folks over at Apache seems to underestimate the difficulty on bootstrapping this massive code base, setting up the repository and managing different branches and releases. Very little of that seems to be discussed. Talking from my experience, you can't manage this code base using Subversion unless you want to cut back heavily on productivity and efficiency. I believe we have managed to set up, and continue to improve our infrastructure over here. And I don't see a reason why we need to move to an imaginary infrastructure that's not even set up & much less adequate. The only reason I would join over there would be if my employer wants to tie my hand and put a leech around my neck to drag me over there to the Apache OOo land. Then I would be working over there, with great reluctance. Kohei -- Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc <kyosh...@novell.com> _______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice