On 03/01/2007, at 4:56 AM, Andre Schnabel wrote:
Vito Smolej schrieb:Well, Clytie, welcome to the (thinned out) crowd: I've had the same, unpleasant experience. With 31.dec.2006 as the deadline,I extended to 31.01.2007
<snip> Thankyou, André. :)What Vito says is true: we do not necessarily have enough time to QA our builds. Depending on the problems found, or the resources each project has available, the process can take much longer than you think or hope it will. :(
I'm still trying to find someone who will run testtool on Windows or Linux for my build. I am willing to do it for OSX (and I have), but I find I have been very overloaded during this release, and need to set some personal limits. Testing other platforms with VMWare would be a lot more work for me, and I don't have the personal resources to do it.
So, if anyone here would be willing to run testtool for my build on Linux or Windows, or if you know someone who would do it, the help would be very much appreciated. :) I think my community is just sitting back and expecting the project to fail again. I would really like to prove them wrong.
And I think, from Vito's points and other experiences we have all had here at OpenOffice.org, we need to ask ourselves _why_, for example, the Vietnamese project failed persistently from the beginning, for several consecutive years. I know quite a lot of effort was put in, and the people involved were skilled and committed. I myself, coming in for this last release, have found the release process much more complicated and drawn-out than in any other software translation project. I think as it is, it defeats people. We need to lower the barriers.
I know I am not the only person who has found this release difficult, protracted and especially hard to handle if you are new to the project. I do not give up easily: I am far too stubborn to have enough sense to see when I'm beaten. But I have even considered giving up on OpenOffice.org. It's just too much work for too little results to my community. (I have a lot of other projects needing my time, and where the same amount of time and effort will produce a lot more results.)
We need to change that, for everyone. TCM is good, and we need to promote its use, possibly use community questionnaires to supplement it as I did in this release. testtool is just a barrier at this stage. It's difficult to understand and difficult to use. We have to find a way of automating it, integrating it somehow so it is easier to use. Currently, it is part of the release-sanity scenario, so it blocks release if people can't run it.
Communication is also a major problem for people new to this project: the structure of OpenOffice.org overall, the huge number of different lists and seemingly separate projects, the lack of communication between lists and projects, the lack of true community involvement at all, are serious problems. However, they are not QA problems, so I will tilt at this windmill elsewhere. ;)
I hope nobody takes this as a negative comment on the work of the QA team. You have all been extremely helpful to me: I would have had to give up long ago if it were not for the help I have received here, and on the mac-porting list, especially. I really value your skills and advice. I think you do a huge amount in difficult circumstances. I just think we need to make the overall circumstances easier for everyone.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
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