On 05/16/2012 11:48 AM, � wrote:
Dear Confused,
My reply is long; short answer: Porting evolved, and there were those
builds maintained by Sun for its clients and then there were those
initiated and maintained by the community. Over time, the roster of
Sun-maintained ports changed. I can give a bigger history of
this�it's kind of interesting, if you are really bored�:-)
well I am not quite THAT bored at the moment. ;)
Thanks for all this. Yes, it did help. Our current situation, as with
any open source project, is that you can only *build* what you can sustain.
Mostly I was asking about this to try to get a feel for what we should
include as "official" builds vs not.
Considering Maho and Pedro (with FreeBSD) and Dario (OS/2) are involved
with the project as committers, why wouldn't we include these builds on
the mirrors? And, we have a Solaris participant as well now.
A further discussion I think. I would think any "ports" by AOO
committers would at some point, be part of the official builds. But more
to follow...
Yeah, these walks down memory lane can be quite interesting. :)
On 2012-05-16, at 13:50 , Kay Schenk wrote:
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 6:37 PM, Louis
Su�rez-Potts<[email protected]>wrote:
Hi
On 2012-05-15, at 17:37 , Kay Schenk wrote:
Hi all--
I was just taking a look at the porting project site:
http://www.openoffice.org/porting/
could someone who is familiar with this project, and hopefully
currently involved with it, fill us in on what the affiliation
of the porters
listed
--
http://www.openoffice.org/porting/porting_overview.html
were to the OpenOffice.org project? Were they committers, etc?
And, if you could provide some idea of the usage numbers for
each, if
they
were kept somewhere, that would be great. Thanks.
I think I can probably answer most of the questions, as we did
track those data, but not sure: much of what was there is a)
gone, b) old, really old.
That said, regarding the committers: See,
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/DomainDeveloper
"Domain Developer," as you know, meant that one had access as a
committer globally.
As to general ports, from memory:
1. Windows.> 95% And then Mac OS X And then, in the single
digits, the rest. (Linux distros., of course, included OOo and
its variants.)
The old spreadsheets from the first few years are probably not
quite accurate--they never were--but suggestive of the breakdown
then of "everything else". However, now, things are quite a lot
different, and past data ought not to prescribe present, let
alone future behaviour.
Louis
Hi Louis--
OK, I'm already confused. The porting page above has no Windows
info on it at all...what I see are mostly *nix derivatives, along
with a few others -- VMS, OS/2, etc.
Yes. The Porting Project, led by Martin H., and originally at
porting.openoffice.org/, now www.oo.org/porting/ I think, focused on
community builds. The old wiki (I mean *old*) Roadmap that sheds
some ancient light is at
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Porting_Roadmap. (One could
also just ask Martin, of course.) I couldn't find a project wiki for
Porting�perhaps Eric or Maho or Joost might know�but I also think
that there was never one. As you know, many projects did not have
evolved doubles living in the wikis�Website, for instance, didn't,
afaik.
The standard builds were Windows, Solaris, LInux; community builds
were everything else, including Mac OS X, but this was then
established as something Sun was officially interested in working on
sometime in 2006-2007, I think, though Eric B can correct me. (The
OOo Milestone page would have that datum.)
My question, more specifically, is why weren't these included with
the other releases -- i.e. Windows, Solaris, MacIntel -- and
shuttled to the mirrors instead of a separate area like this?
Eric Bachard, Maho NAKATA, could probably answer better, as could
Joost or Juergen, I'm sure. But it has to do, to a degree, with the
cleaving elements of OOo: that some ports were substantially QA'd and
maintained by the contributing company as well as the interested
community and others pretty much only by the interested community,
which nevertheless followed the strictest QA protocols. Another way
of thinking of it, is that it had to do with resources available-and
able to be coordinated.
The overall issue was very difficult to resolve, and probably wasn't
(continuance relied more on personality than structure). We are
encountering a version of it here. Some builds�say the most desired
and popular, both platform and language-wise�are ready before other,
less popular ones. Do we issue the ready ones immediately? Or do we
wait? And if you are dealing with, say, a dozen ports and over 100
languages, many of which are not regularly maintained but you don't
always know which, the logistics become even more fun. So, in
coordination with the community and centring a lot of this on QA,
compromises were made. They were unstable, as became evident. But,
really, this is a perennial problem in open source projects: what to
release, how to release, when to release, and so on. Fwiw, my friend
Martin Michlmayr, of Debian fame and now with HP leading the best of
that company's open source window, wrote his dissertation on the
problem of releases in open source projects. The conclusion: You need
a release programme.
They seem to be considered "official" from OpenOffice.org and yet,
not quite.
Can you tell me why?
Without being dangerously cynical? No. :-) But more directly�and I
have difficulty in being cynical--I probably framed the scenario
above. The bigger issue, which is less obvious, and characteristic of
some few corporate engagements with open source, is that large
company Z. responds to market pressures, and though open source
projects, which include participants generally part of the same
market environment, may nevertheless look to satisfy insistent user
demands that significantly diverge from those the sponsoring company
is working on and thus allocating its resources to resolving. In the
case of OOo, as well as other projects, where we had "project leads"
and where the route to becoming one was as obvious as the route to
heaven and more difficult, it put into question the governance model,
especially as we proclaimed democratic and meritocratic virtues like
any other open source project.
Sorry for length.
Cheers Louis
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MzK
"Well, life has a funny way of sneaking up on you And life has
a funny way of helping you out Helping you out." -- "Ironic",
Alanis Morissette
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MzK
"Well, life has a funny way of sneaking up on you And life has a
funny way of helping you out Helping you out." -- "Ironic", Alanis
Morissette
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MzK
"Well, life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
And life has a funny way of helping you out
Helping you out."
-- "Ironic", Alanis Morissette
