On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 9:47 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote: > It's an odd situation. In many ways an [email protected] list would > appear to remain useful but I think it creates a decision crisis for users to > have too many of these. > > What I notice about [libreoffice-users] and also [libreoffice] (the dev list) > is that many user-level reports have to do with (1) interoperability between > a version of ODF-based software and another format (Microsoft Word and > Microsoft Excel being prominent). The other kind of interoperability is > among versions of ODF-based software where an older version works differently > (often better) than a newer one. These are also often related to > interoperability with software having different native formats. >
That's the nature of support almost anywhere. Very little software operates in a vacuum. You are part of a stack and have interactions with the OS, with other apps, with peripherals, all from other vendors. The nice thing is, with commercial products at least, companies would work together to support their mutual customers. In other words, rather than just passing the buck and bouncing the customer around, the support engineer from company A would get on the phone with the support engineer from company B and compare notes. At least that is how we did back when I worked in support, many years ago. > Sometimes, the inter-version comparisons are between an OO.o release and a > subsequent LibreOffice release. > > There are also general questions and tips that work for any recent OpenOffice > 3.x and LibreOffice 3.x releases and their documentation. > > However, I don't think we can expect users to sort out which is the right > list for these: LibreOffice-specific, OpenOffice-legacy-specific, Apache > OpenOffice (nothing to talk about yet), or some common OpenOffice shared > space. > > So, realistically, I think it will be super-users and their cousins, > including developers and documentation authors, who will notice cross-over > cases and perhaps guide users to an appropriate place while also providing > useful answers. > One thing that is different in community led support is the motivations. In the commercial space, support engineers are generally rated on productivity and/or customer satisfaction. Depending on the ratio, this can lead to passing the buck or not. With community volunteers, the motivations are not going to all be the same. For example, there is no FIFO discpline for answering questions on the current user list. Some questions are never answered. It is based on the interest of those answering questions. This is natural, in a sense, but doesn't necessarily meet user expectations. That is one reason why I think we need to put an emphasis on avoiding support questions.. > For bug reports, I think it is always going to be with respect to a release > that an user is operating with, and sharing what is a common-mode problem > across forks/derivatives and their releases is going to depend on developers > noticing and talking to each other. We might not be able to share patches > but we can definitely attempt to share issues that we may have in common. > We can share patches in one direction, AOOo -> LO. Whether the patches are easily integrable will depend on the degree of code divergence. But shared patches are the lowest form of reuse. I'm hoping we can move it up component-level reuse at some point. > - Dennis > > -----Original Message----- > From: Pedro Giffuni [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2011 18:12 > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [email protected] [Was: Re: [Discussion] [email protected]] > > Well .. > > An important difference, I think, is that the forum will serve for all > openoffice variants (including LibreOffice). The mailinlist can only > attend issues related to Apache OpenOffice since it"s the codebase we > maintain and support. > > Pedro. > > On Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:01 +0200, "Marcus (OOo)" > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Yes, it seems a bit difficult to decide what is the best for all or >> at least the majority of our users. >> >> Maybe someone has some more agruements about MLs vs. forums. >> >> Marcus >> >> >> > >
