And of course many votes don't necessarily mean that the issue must be done with any urgency or even done at all. First, we don't have countervotes. What if there are 200 in favor, but 2000 against? Second it is probably easy to summon a few dozen or even hundreds of people to raise an issue to the top of the list. Compared to the number of users of OOo or even to the registered project members, 200 is not much. And last in an OSS project no developer is obliged to develop anything on someone else's schedule or priority list. We try to listen to our users, but this includes those users that don't shout loudly in the OOo project. For paid developers their paying customers surely come first, for unpaid ones their very own preferences are foremost......
Sorry for the rant. I don't want to offend anyone. I rather hope that more people will discover all the wonderful instruments we have for participating in the development process and use them. Of course there is much to be improved processwise. But I really hope that e.g. the new RFE process will get more people involved at an earlier stage for the next release (the one after 2.0).
The whole point about this issue and similar ones is that many of us do not understand who ever asked to remove that menu from the quickstart (is an example). There was an issue on that?
Many of us think that developers are willing to add features, not to remove them. It is in human nature that a less change (less freedom, less option, less function, less money) will be reacted much more that a positive change. If you add something, probably get some congratulations from some people. If you remove it, you bet even those who do not use it will complain.
I do not know about SUN deadlines, but the community is not imposing a deadline on 2.0. If a *functional* beta were out for longer, the quality
control process by final users would be much better. You may understand that users want to test the things working. Perhaps reading the spec doc we do not realize at first the problems that may arise.
As for RFE, its new for me. I am used to RFEs in the Python community. I only hope OOo new RFE procedure will be as transparent and dynamical as Python�s. There announcements are very clearly marked in the general list and main page, opinions and votes raised outside core developers, and decisions well explained before commited. And they have an excellent track of backwards compatibility! These newsgroups are a direct source of user feedback on OOo developers. Please, do not dismiss them in favor of more in house development.
- Enrique -
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