Daniel Carrera wrote: > > That is a huge deployment barrier. Do you seriously expect me to make an > add-on and tell my mom, uncle, or my non-geek friend to run pkgchk? > Think about that for a second.
If you are just saying "deployment should be easy" I say: it is for OOo. If you are talking about end users, you should do it. End users should use the package manager dialog. I can't see a big barrier here, though of course UI is always a matter of taste. I for myself don't like the firefox way where you can install only by clicking on hyperlinks or use D&D from you file system after downloading the file. I prefer the way Ooo and Thunderbird use: use a dialog with a file selector. Unfortunately you still define deployment only as "it should be easy for end users", but that misses the point. It *also* should be easy for end users (thus we added the package manager), but IMHO primarily easy deployment means that it should be doable with small effort, powerful, safe and reversible. The Mozilla/Firefox deployment way fails utterly in three points, while OOo always followed a clear concept and so allows you all of this. If using an "easy" deployment for several extensions over time at the end leaves a lot of garbage and, incompatible versions in your profile and themes and extensions that disturb each other I wouldn't call that easy. This *really* is more than the average mom, uncle or non-geek friend can stand. I can't tell you how often people complained about problems with extensions in newsgroups and the answer was: start with a new profile. That can't be "easy" deployment. It's careless. > Second, I found the documentation anything but clear. I'm sure that > *you* think it's the clearest thing in the world. But I sure didn't. And > I wasted a lot of time talking to people trying to find a good way to > have a stupid little macro installed, and I did not manage it. Maybe you asked the wrong people? Sorry, I don't know whom you asked, but I'm sure that I could have explained it to you in a few minutes. > Telling me that the documentation is easy does not make it easy for me. > It just frustrates me. I didn't say, it's eay, I said: it clearly describes it. And yes, I still claim that this is correct. I know that it maybe hard to find. Many of our problems boil down to the point that our documentation is "too big". >>>I found XUL much easier. I actually enjoyed writing a GUI with XUL. >> >> Because you know it. > > No, look, one of the things I liked most about it was how quickly I > could learn it. In spite of very poor documentation, by just guessing I > was able to write an interesting GUI in a very short time. Maybe you have another approach, but I usually want to understand the background of what I'm doing, and it took me several weeks to get into the Mozilla stuff. So perhaps I should change my statement: it's easier and faster for starters to hack some XUL stuff than it is to hack some OOo stuff, but if you want to become a part of the development, you have to learn a lot in both cases. So the OOo development obviously has a steeper learning curve, right? You see, the word "easy" is not sharp defined enough to avoid misunderstandings. >> Of course, if you know something about HTML, CSS, DOM etc. it is >> easier to build your application on top of that knowledge while you >> usually don't know much about OOo's internal structure - but hey, isn't >> that an unfair comparison? ;-) > > Actually... isn't it a good language feature that it builds upon > previous concepts that a lot of people know very well? Every programmer > I know is versed in HTML and CSS. OOo also build on concepts a lot of people know. Unfortunately those are other people than you are referring to, most of them have a lot of experience in development. Don't get me wrong, I didn't say it's wrong that you can reuse your knowledge in HTML/CSS in Mozilla development (on the contrary, I just wanted to say, using this for a comparison is unfair, because this wasn't an option for OOo. >> Perhaps you didn't ask? Perhaps you asked, people told you about >> pkgchk.exe and you didn't follow the advice? I don't know, but it *is* easy. > > I DID ask, I looked everywhere I could, I spent hours on IRC, I emailed > several different people, I spent weeks on it. Please don't act like I > didn't do anything. I didn't say that, I just said: I don't know whom you asked. I can't believe that a question on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list about macro deployment would have been unanswered. > All of the above are potential reasons. But the fact remains that I made > a sincere and prolonged effort and failed. And you are not doing anyone > a favour by assuming that I didn't try. And I take issue with that > assumption. I hope that I have made clear that this wasn't my intent. And I already agreed that we have a documentation problem. My point always was that I don't agree that deploying OOo extension is hard. Best regards, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer - OpenOffice.org Application Framework Project Lead Please reply to the list only, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a spam sink. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
