I can think of a few that are pressing but not necessarily the sort of thing
being dreamed of.
1. Usability issues. We have a couple of serious usability issues with
respect to the current code base. These are at least for Windows:
a. A method for automatically backing up and resetting an user profile is
needed.
It might actually need to be a standalone utility, but it would be cool
to have as an option where there are messages that offer reset as a way of
getting unstuck in a cycle of non-clearing failure messages.
b. We need to make sure that failures because an instance of AOO is already
running can shut down the running instance as an option. We should also turn
off quick-start by default. Current OS releases do a better job of load and
performance balancing. (Actually, that would be a very useful quick fix.)
c. There needs to be clean-up of the Java-required business, both of silent
crashes in the absence of a JVM and in cases where the bitness of the existing
JVM is not what AOO needs (on Windows).
There may well be long-range fixes in these areas, but it would be good to
have gradual improvement and easing of the current, immediate pain that users
are experiencing and that consume our volunteers in providing workarounds.
2. Release Engineering. We currently have no release manager for any future
releases whatsoever. The stable, repeatable creation of releases, and building
from release-candidate source (not the SVN) needs to be established, and
quickly. Some sort of buddy-system is needed to develop more contributors who
are experienced at making release candidates and there needs to be appropriate
documentation, including what are the commands and parameters for those cases.
a. At the moment we have fixes on crashers and an encryption problem that we
can't put in user hands. If we have a security vulnerability for which there
is an active exploit, it is not clear how long it would take to have a
mitigating maintenance release.
b. The production of signed MSI releases for Windows is urgent as a way of
dealing with download uncertainties and distinguishing authentic AOO
distributions from any others. The second priority should be satisfaction of
OSX requirements for authenticated software.
c. Having a process where there are systematic, periodic maintenance
releases regardless of feature releases under development is essential. Those
should have minimum requirement for internationalization, documentation, UI
changes, etc., while providing reliability improvements in a controlled manner.
The QA should consist of confirmation of asserted fixes and checking against
regression.
- Dennis
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patricia Shanahan [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2016 09:00
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Where to start?
>
> I expect to complete my "Building on Windows" project in the next day or
> so, by documenting the results in
> https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Building_Guide_AOO/Step_b
> y_step#Windows_7
>
> That means it is time to pick another project. Any suggestions?
>
> Here is a brief resume:
>
> Education:
>
> B.Sc. Mathematics, Imperial College London, 1970
> M.Sc. Computer Science, Birkbeck College London University, 1975
> Ph.D. Computer Science, UC San Diego, 2009
>
> Work:
>
> I worked from 1970 to 2002 for NCR, Celerity, FPS, Cray Research, and
> Sun Microsystems. I worked on application software, operating systems,
> compilers, system performance, and server platform architecture. I was
> performance architect for the Sun E10000 and 15K.
>
> Unfortunately, my professional end-user applications development
> experience was writing programs that expected punch card or paper tape
> input. More recently, I have written computer performance models in C++
> and Java, and did simulations in Java for my dissertation research.
>
> Although my C++ experience is rusty and predates widespread availability
> of the STL, I should be able to get it up to date relatively easily. I
> have used templates and operator overloading.
>
>
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