[ Special week, in-person at the conference. ]
* Present:
+ Jonathan, Michael W, Cloph, Miklos, Rene, Xisco, Olivier, Laszlo, Ilmari
* Intro
+ Xisco -> qa: crashreports, bug stats, new high severity / most pressing bugs
+ also input for release schedule
+ Olivier -> documentation: help and user guides
+ also clarifying what the software does: ideally software + guide
release goes out at the same time
+ interact with development when the behavior is unclear
+ open to suggestions: e.g. use of LLM for this area or not?
+ use more multimedia content or not?
+ Cloph -> release engineering
+ also overseeing Jenkins/CI
+ and stats on failure rates
+ Michael W -> a11y developer
+ Jonathan -> rtl/ctl/cjk support
+ Miklos -> leading ESC calls, Writer
+ Rene -> Debian maintainer of LO
+ Ilmari -> internship programs, mentoring, qa
* Meetings are free to attend, every Thur at 16:00 Berlin time (Cloph)
+ if you have something to discuss with the ESC, feel free to join
+ Developer Certification (Laszlo)
+ regularly looking for new possibly to-be-certified developers
+ looking for people with many, non-trivial bugfixes in multiple areas
+ next round in the near future (few weeks)
+ TDF site lists certified developers, from multiple organizations
+ also unaffiliated ones
+ anybody can be certified, once the expertese is proven
+ easy hacks don't really count
+ tip: find a problem that annoys you personally, then fix it
+ if blocked, fine to ask for help
+ just asking on IRC / mailing list is fine, gerrit usage is not mandatory
when you ask for feedback
+ this is how he started: ~oneliner fix ~20 years ago
+ fine to work incrementally, perhaps somebody else will contribute the
next step
+ also: hacking on language support (spellchecking, hyphenation, etc.)
+ interest in typography: DTP features in Writer, will do a presentation
about that
+ Questions
+ Eyal: ~90% percent of what we do is just overseeing regular things, boring
+ only 10% is non-recurring, it seems from the minutes?
+ correct impression, which is good (Cloph)
+ means: no burning fires
+ e.g. shortened realease cycle: something bad happened
+ or late features: if something is to be discussed, those are exceptions
+ "what's cooking" section is non-recurring
+ What was the most controversial problem we had to decide on? (Bence)
+ e.g. decisions around default Base backend: hsqldb vs firebird (Cloph)
+ or major version number, ranking tender ideas (Miklos)
+ What's the streeing role of the ESC? (Eyal)
+ we usually do conflict resolution, not really steering (Miklos)
+ or an example: when / what to deprecate / remove (Ilmari)
+ e.g. upgrade a baseline for the next major release
+ Different polish level of modules (Eyal)
+ seeing Writer as the most polished, e.g. Base is under-loved
+ does the community / TDF wants to invets in these under-loved areas?
+ e.g. seeing this year's budget: new developer to work on Base (not
Impress)
+ the ESC was not involved here (Cloph)
+ more potential: a UI developer (Ilmari)
+ optimistic that this will push things forward
+ also, hopefully you used Impress to create talk slides, if you ran into
a bug, please do file them, that's the first step (Jonathan)
+ Could you please talk a little bit more on a11y? (Alain)
+ will have a talk on this, on what happened in the past year (Michael W)
+ a11y is a wide topic, the focus on helping people with disabilities
+ motion visibilities, blind people, etc.
+ mostly working on people who use screenreaders
+ this is mostly work in LO, also in toolkits
+ we get feedback from the a11y mailing list, bugzilla, private email, etc.
+ state depends on the module: perhaps Writer is in the best state, and
also general toolkit issues on the UI
+ Competition with other office suites (Eyal)
+ Do we monitor what's new in google docs / MSO / etc?
+ There is no specific task-force, but e.g. Heiko has a good overview
(Cloph)
+ UX review is usually part of adding larger features
+ If a larger new feature is added, the ESC is aware of that (Xisco)
+ Usually users do request features available in other office suites
(Miklos)
+ Screen resolution requirement? (Alain)
+ We increased that a little recently (Cloph)
+ The system requirements are on the website for specific values (Ilmari)
+ Is the ESC dealing with the tools that the project uses for development?
(Bence)
+ At a minimum, we are forced to update these if the current tool / tool
version is now unsupported (Cloph)
+ E.g. OS updates are stopped -> we don't support that then, either
+ keep best-effort level support for a little while more
+ don't break intentionally, but if it gets broken, we don't fix it
+ Or we want to start new C++ language features
+ Process is: proposal on "I want to use xyz, because ...", then ask for
feedback (Michael W)
+ Infra parts: the ESC doesn't deal with that
+ Part of the development comes from companies, who have customers wanting
features (Olivier)
+ e.g. interop work is coming from their demand, usually
