Hi,
over the last weeks, there were several discussions on the different
lists and within several blogs about hurdles when contributing to OOo.
In general, most of the participants within this discussions agreed that
contribution must become easier and the tools used, such as the build
environment, specifications and the CWS process itself, must become much
more open for non Sun contributors and more community focused.
I personally read most of this discussions on the list and we had lots
of corresponding speaks within Sun. I meet with Michael Bemmer, Stefan
Taxhet, Lutz Hoeger, Dieter Loeschky, Martin Hollmichel and Thorsten
Ziehm to find some agreements what we could imagine to be changed ASAP
to ensure a more community friendly environment.
This are the short term changes we like to propose:
1. Specs within Wiki. Lets move over to wiki for those who like to
create specifications there. Christian Jansen already offered his
support to create a corresponding Wiki template. We should do this ASAP
as it supports the collaboration idea and avoids usage of CVS for
specifications.
2. Release Committee: Lets revive the OOo release committee. Initially,
I like to nominate todays release status meeting (Uwe Luebbers, Martin
Hollmichel, Mathias Bauer, Bettina Haberer) and Pavel Janek as members
of this committee. Today, the Release Status Meeting agrees on
priorities for releases, on integration and re-targeting of CWSs and
Issues and other stuff around our releases, and is staffed with members
of different functional groups. This is in line with the idea of the
former release committee which we already had in past. All this should
be done by the the release committee as a official OOo forum in future.
We would like to see the current team to work on a official transition
to the release committee again.
3. Developer Code Line: Lets open up the current SRC680 code line for
continuous CWS integration with CWSs nominated by the corresponding
QA-Reps. Nowadays, each and every CWS will be nominated by the Release
Manager, which is Martin Hollmichel. To ease integration, this
nominations should be handled by QA-Reps from now on, meaning that we'll
have a switch "from ready for QA" to "nominated" leaving out the
"approved by QA". As the QA-Rep could be from the OOo QA project, Suns
QA or someone else who is able to check implementations and changes, it
will be much easier to get things integrated fast (or in other words in
the next mile stone right after passing QA).
For each release, we should open a release code line as we do today.
Instead of having Martin nominating all CWSs on such release code lines
(..., OOD680, OOE680), this should be done by the OOo project leads and
the Release Committee (which has to be reanimated beforehand).
Beside these three things were we like to initiate a change, there are
currently things in progress which we like support more actively to
bring down some restriction and hurdles we have.
For CWSs, we typically like to see at least two installation sets on
different platforms before integration. As this is a major issue for
some contributors, we will support this by offering Build Bots for this
purpose. We already have added a Solaris Build Bot (thanks to Thorsten
Behrens) and will start to provide corresponding builds ASAP.
Some of you might have heard about the UnHack OOo initiative initiated
by Kai Backmann and others. I have asked our release engineering to
actively support this.
Peter Mladek and Martin Hollmichel are working on the o3-build
(http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/O3-build), a out of the box
OOo Linux environment which provides some kind of OOo live CD including
a complete Build Environmet and a corresponding source tree. As this is
a very easy way to get a OOo environment up and running, we will
investigate how to ensure availability of corresponding CD images for
each released source tar ball.
I know that all the things mentioned within this mail are just a first
step into the right direction, but this are things we can change within
days and which will take effect very fast. The proposed changes are all
about the development turn around starting with specification and ending
up into a fast and uncomplicated integration into a development code
line. We will shift control about this from inside Sun to the OOo
community, from the release status meeting staffed by Sun member to the
OOo release committee and to the OOo project leads. Therefor, I like to
ask for your support for the proposed topics 1-3.
Thanks,
Nils
--
**************************************************************************
Nils Fuhrmann Tel: +49 40 23646 500
Manager StarOffice Operations Fax: +49 40 23646 550
Sun Microsystems GmbH mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Nagelsweg 55 http://www.sun.com/StarOffice
20097 Hamburg - Germany
**************************************************************************
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
