Re: [dev] Re: Grand Concept, splitting up the monolith, dynamic content

2008-10-01 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Mathias,

On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 18:03 +0200, Mathias Bauer wrote:
 My personal experience with asking people about possible code sharing
 quite often was: I don't like UNO, I don't like Windows, I don't like
 your build system etc. etc. While some of these statements are valid, I
 always wonder why nobody says: nice idea, how to make it happen and how
 can I help you.

Well, it's clear we need to go out and evangelise. This is the
difference between passive and pro-active :-) There are also more
telling issues such as control, ownership, timeline  RCS of shared code
that tend to be problematic - but that aside ... one of the first things
I tried to work on (back in 2001) was using autotools for sal / cppu
etc. such that we could re-use UNO elsewhere in the Gnome desktop: that
met with resounding loathing from the build.pl / dmake lovers - and was
one of the things that killed that co-operation (AFAIR). [ and I was
doing the work and trying to contribute it (even in parallel with dmake
foo) ]. Strangely, not the first time that our passion for our (frankly
unbelievable) build-system has substantially hindered useful
co-operation with others ;-)

Ultimately, if we want to evangelise our technology it is necessary to
meet the other people where they are, listen to their problems and adapt
to them. Technologies that don't do that fail in the long term.

Of course, there is a lot for others to dislike in UNO - the
UCS-2/UTF-16 Win32 heritage of all strings, the appalling intrinsic
threading / granularity problems ( un-addressed by apartments ), and so
on: but at least it should be a no-brainer to share non-UNO-using pieces
of the infrastructure.

HTH,

Michael.

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[dev] Re: [council-discuss] Re: [discuss] Suggestions for a new Community Council structure

2008-06-09 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Andre,

On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 15:25 +0200, Andre Schnabel wrote:
 The council in it's current structure seems very centralistic to me
 (it's almost built around the project leads).

Sure, it's a problem wrt. generating interest and participation. 

 Anyway - it would need time to discuss some rules who should be
 eligible. An we surely should discuss this. 

Do you have a personal time-line, or estimate of when you would want
that to yield a result ? 1 month ? 6 months ? 1 year ? 3 years ? ;-)

 But next council elections are overdue, for more than a year now (if
 not two). So we really should go on with new elections.

Well, IMHO the fact that the elections have not happened for years at a
time in the past, and that the structure is agreed by virtually everyone
(that speaks up) to be sub-optimal, surely suggests that now is a great
time to re-invigorate the council structures before the next election.
What greater legacy can the out-going members give, than a more open,
interesting and accountable structure for OpenOffice ?

ie. do we really need to delay ? ;-)

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] VCL UI Rework

2008-05-23 Thread Michael Meeks

On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 13:15 +0200, Christian Lippka wrote:
 Michael Meeks wrote:
  There was some resistance to nominating this for 3.0 because ChristianL
  wanted to re-do the translation work to use Java Properties instead of
  the new transex tool we wrote that translated complete XML files
  per-lang.

Ah ! - finally I see your reply while looking for something else in the
archives ;-) [ a CC is most appreciated when using the collab-lists ].

 This is bogus, I discussed with Jan that in my opinion it is a cleaner
 solution to use the Java Properties file for translation as I think the
 current way of doing it does not fit with the OOo translation database
 and tooling. I wanted to look into it but never said this would be a
 stopper for this cws.

Oh; sorry - presumably I'm confused: but AFAIR there was a concern
about the translation mechanism that held things up. I too like the Java
properties (a bit) now I think about them - but, OTOH - I didn't like
them a while back  I can't remember why ;-) sadly that is all the state
I kept. Nevertheless - I think Java Properties is the direction we want
to go in now.

HTH,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] VCL UI Rework

2008-05-23 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Jurgen,

On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 10:12 +0200, Juergen Schmidt wrote:
 whatever we will use in the future it will be important that we will 
 have a GUI editor to make the design of new dialogs much more easier 
 than today.

Yep; absolutely - it's in the spec. and we have a quarter-functioning
one already ;-)

 Ideally a replacement for the basic dialog editor and make it more 
 general for internal development as well as extension development 
 (includes Basic as it does today).

Sure - ideally :-)

 I think it is important to concentrate on one format everywhere and 
 consolidate the different formats that we have today over time.

Well - I read the xmlscript code at some considerable length, and also
the toolkit/ 'model' code too - and we tried to work with that to start
with: we came to the conclusion after burning quite a while, that
writing something simple  clean was much easier with a containment
hierarchy  did something new.

HTH,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] VCL UI Rework

2008-05-14 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Kay,

On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 11:42 +0200, Kay Ramme wrote:
 does anybody know what the state and plans regarding the VCL UI Rework 
 (see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VCL_UI_Rework) project 
 are? As we need to do something to improve our GUI, this seems to be a 
 good step into the right direction ...

Sure - so Jan is working on this full time - modulo having just had a
baby  taking some time off for that. Oh - and also, having been
somewhat shipwrecked by the problems of bootstrapping new-3.0
split-up-OO.o enough to get the editor / tests working again in 3.0 [ a
bottomless time sink no doubt based on my experience making it work in
the 1st place ].

Anyhow in the absence of Jan who can give you a live update (janneke on
#go-oo) - currently some version of the layout code is merged into
toolkit/ in DEV300 and has been re-factored to fit more snugly within
the toolkit structure [ saving some ugliness ].

toolkit/workben/layout has some samples.

I believe Jan is working on converting some of the more tricky dialogs
- eg. the calc format dialog - and extending the vclcompat API, and
creating wrappers for embedding old-style fixed-size VCL widgets inside
Layout containers  vv.

I believe he is doing that work in a CWS 'layoutdialogs' - which is the
latest code.

There was some resistance to nominating this for 3.0 because ChristianL
wanted to re-do the translation work to use Java Properties instead of
the new transex tool we wrote that translated complete XML files
per-lang.

So - in summary; it's going quite nicely - though Jan is away for a
bit: and wrt. helping out - perhaps the most useful thing would be to
unwind the UNO*3.0* nightmare in the CWS so that toolkit/workben/layout
's 'test' binary will run again; and/or secondarily looking at java
property files for translation: which prolly belongs near
toolkit/source/layout/import.cxx [ still a not-cleaned-up WIP ].

Oh; and you need to export ENABLE_LAYOUT=TRUE to get that good stuff to
build :-)

HTH,

Michael.

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[dev] Re: [tools-perf] Re: [dev] Benchmarking multiple versions of OOo

2008-04-08 Thread Michael Meeks

On Mon, 2008-04-07 at 14:40 -0600, Andrew Z wrote:
  What I really want is something like Michael's
  http://live.gnome.org/iogrind but that just says your app burned up
  110,000 bogoios and 90,000,000 bogocpus and every time you run it it
  says 110,000 bogoios and 90,000,000 bogocups. It doesn't even matter
  too much if it the ratio is wildly different to the real world as long
  as it's consistent between runs and reducing measurable bogoios reduces
  real world work by some amount.
 
 I am not a performance guru, but I think not all bogoios are worth the
 same in practice.  For example, see slides 15-16 here

So - bogoio's are the right approach; the problem is less getting an
accurate simulation, but getting a repeatable simulation :-) of course,
accuracy is nice if you can be repeatable; but ...

Unfortunately, iogrind doesn't work wonderfully well for threaded
applications; but it can be run on OO.o to profile cold-start; and it
might even give some useful numbers - particularly now there is a
'warming' feature (so you can simulate eg. gedit first to warm the gtk
+ / glibc stack (etc.)).

The console mode will give you a single 12.35 bogoseconds type
number.

HTH,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] New License and Contributor Agreement

2008-04-01 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Martin,

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 13:19 +0100, Martin Hollmichel wrote:
  Also, there are some improvements possible wrt. Section 7 - eg. how
  does updating modules in external projects (eg. boost under BSD) fit
  with this clause ? is that something only Sun can do ? [ eg.
  (hypothetically) how could Fridrich commit an updated version of
  libwpd ? ].

 we're working on a revamp of the external project homepage to give 
 guidelines for all these kind of questions, please stay tuned for a some 
 more couple of days,

Well; it's *20* days later, and I'm still unclear what the SCA means
here. There are conflicting reports:

The licensing FAQ at:

http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-licensing.html

Now has a question:

How are extensions affected by the new agreement
 and license?

That appears to link to an answer in a different section 'sca11'. That
should be 'sca13' I believe.

sca13 - mis-spells 'including', and apparently the sense of that, when
read with the SCA falls short of what has been reported elsewhere.

I must be missing something: where are the guidelines ... as posted by
us [Sun] on Openoffice.org as referenced in the SCA ? I assume Sun will
follow at least the spirit of the agreement it asks people to sign.

Presumably if this was available to read, there would be less concern 
more clarity around this issue.

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] GoOOoCon2008 / Prague ...

2008-03-10 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Charles,

As always it's entertaining talking with you.

On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 16:02 +0100, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
 Yes, it is one; I thought it was a community event. While technical  
 discussions are perennial to our project, I don't see the need for  
 segregating the community between hackers and non hackers;

As I understand it this is a normal practice for organic communities:
eg. the Linux Kernel Summit[1] - has purely technical talks, or say the
Gnome Developers Summit[2], or perhaps aKademy (AFAIR originally billed
as a developers conference). There are of course a myriad of
hack-fests, and other highly technical conferences on many topics
everywhere.

Are you suggesting that these are fundamentally evil ? that developers
meeting to talk, enjoy each others' company, work together and discuss
technical detail is bad ? it's not as if we are excluding anyone - just
warning ahead of time this will be technical, and our core constituency
is hackers. Clearly broader conferences have their place too.

  every part of our community is legitimate

Did I suggest it was not ?

  Honestly, I'm happy to talk politics[1] vigorously: will you
  share an hour slot with me for a debate on the future of OpenOffice in
  Beijing ?
 
 I will be more than happy to do so

Great; I suggest the Parlimentary debating style[3] and a proposal of
the form:

 Contribution to OpenOffice.org by entities with
  diverse motivations is a strength not a weakness
[ or you can cast it negatively if you wish ].

I'm sure Sun, or someone can provide an impartial speaker to compare
it: I'm not sure how well it would go over to a predominantly non native
speaking audience, though with slides we might get somewhere: sounds
fun.

  although debating with somebody from Microsoft could have probably
  sped up things.

Nice rhetoric, shame about the mismatch with reality; and what do you
want to speed up ? I was thinking of starting with Why I believe
Open-Source/Free Software is the disruptive movement of our time - I
suspect MS has a different view.

  Of course, such a debate is possible provided I can get the funding
 to go there, and I realize that you and I, just like many other
 contributors, are facing this problem.

Book early to save :-)

 See my first comment: provided that the community as a whole is  
 invited, it is a Regicon, yes.

Honestly, substance concerns me far more than branding; do call it what
you will; all are welcome - the content will be ~exclusively technical.

Regards,

Michael.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Kernel_Developers_Summit
+ sadly invitation only, not my preferred approach.
[2] - http://live.gnome.org/BostonSummit
[3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_debate
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Re: [dev] GoOOoCon2008 / Prague ...

2008-03-07 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Charles,

On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 19:39 +0100, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
 - it will be 'hackers' only

Well, given the content of the talks and company, I'm
confident it will be much less interesting to non-hackers, so modulo
some really patient people coming, you're prolly right, is that a
problem ?

 - nobody will be able to speak politics (ah, those darned politics
 and, always pointing out awkward things about your employer!
 Why do they even exist?)

Honestly, I'm happy to talk politics[1] vigorously: will you
share an hour slot with me for a debate on the future of OpenOffice in
Beijing ? However, I realise that other people are not; in particular
our friends among the Sun hackers. Indeed, at the last two ESC
meetings, it has been similarly forbidden to discuss so called
'politics', instead focusing on technical issues.

 which in essence means, that discussions will be managed

Sure, self regulated - I agree it sucks at some level, but
don't believe for a moment it's for my benefit.

 - you seem to be ignoring the existence of RegiCons, or regional
 conferences that work very well.

Yep, was unaware of them; on the other hand I want to meet,
talk to and drink beer with hackers from all over the place: is that
what a RegiCon is ? if so, lets call it a RegiCon.

 In short, you advertise for a Novell event. Notice that I think a
 Novell event could be an interesting idea, but, as I wrote above,
 the way it is being pictured looks problematic to me.

Problematic because it tramples on some existing RegiCon ? or
that it is primarily focused at developers[2] ? or because it's (as I
said) tacked onto the end of an existing Novell event, or becuase it's
organised by Novell ? or ... ?

All the best,

Michael.

[1] - eg. I'm still waiting for some a reply that appears to have been
collateral damage in an unrelated end-thread (though perhaps now moot
with the new SCA exemptions, only time will tell):
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=devmsgNo=21708

[2] - If the Native-Lang guys want to have their own
Native-Lang-contributors-only meetings whether virtual, or real I
have no problem with that; why different for developers ?
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[dev] GoOOoCon2008 / Prague ...

2008-03-06 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi guys,

The Novell team thought that, what with the next OOoCon being in
Beijing and the cost of travel there (etc.) and of course the broad
focus of that conference; that it would be good to have a very
hacker-focused event in Europe. So, we're inviting all hyper-technical
people (with or without long hair) to join the Novell go-oo team for
part of their annual team face-to-face in Prague.

To re-iterate, this is not an attempt to undermine OOoCon - if you can
only afford to go to one conference (money, time, spousal -patience /
whatever); go to OOoCon.

Having said that, it should be a fun time to sit and chew over the
latest developments, problems, and opportunities - while getting to know
other people.

Conference site:
+ http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/GoOOCon_2008
The place:
+ Prague, beautiful city, home to SUSE labs, an
  inexpensive place to stay  eat
The time:
+ April 11th / 12th
The (preliminary) plan:
+ April 11th, ad-hoc presentations, hacking, evening
  drinks / meal.
+ April 12th, am: more of the same
  pm: fun ropes course / team building
+ check the wiki as time passes for more details.
Getting there:
+ unfortunately, we can't pay expenses, which is sad.
+ on the other hand, cheap flights  cheap hotels
  shouldn't bust the bank.

We're trying to keep the event small  friendly, focusing on
hard-core coding, and vcl/source/inc/hardcore.hxx type topics. There
is no need to speak, but if you have something you want to talk about,
please do show up with some slides, and drop Kendy a line with some idea
of what you'd like to say.

* There will also be a moratorium on overt politics *

Inevitably, this being the .cz republic, unless you are
careful, there will be a certain amount of walking through forests,
and with the ropes course it's worth bringing some good footwear.

Please poke Kendy [ NB. not the mailing list ;- ] if you can
come.

Thanks for reading,

   Michael, JP  team.

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[dev] positive discussion ...

2008-02-11 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Sophie,

Thanks for your mail; I agree - this particular dead-end of the thread
got a little unpleasant  highly charged; I'm well up for killing it.

On Fri, 2008-02-08 at 20:42 +0100, sophie wrote:
 We are now thinking about SCA, an adapted one to our community, so no
 need to quarrel about what is already behind.

Is there a link to a copy of that somewhere ? (or is the thinking going
on on a public mailing list ?).

 If you really have this energy to argue, please come and discuss how we 
 can reenforce our workflow, our communication flow, our visibility and 
 add more power to our community.

I think I'm missing something here. Is there a public statement
anywhere that means discussing the unbalanced ownership problems, that
(clearly) substantilly impeed Novell's involvement (and that of other
developers) is fruitless ?

Are you aware of any such statement, or indication from Sun, that says
this problem is un-solvable; whatever the community wants ?

Of course, such a statement might shut down such discussion pretty
quickly, but I havn't seen any clear public statement of that form.
Indeed, I've not seen many clear, black  white statements about the
compromises necessary to accomodate our major sponsor's business
interest (which is of course necessary to some degree) inside the
project; and what plans there are for the future here.

  But confidence is a key word in all these discussions to make them
 come to real facts. So please, really, stop this fight, and allow us
 to think at something that is reflecting our common love for OOo.

So - I think we were getting there - we'd finally got past some of the
more basic, emotive, low-level arguments, and were starting to
communicate; at least mba  I seemed happy:

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=devmsgNo=21708

clearly no-one wants to shut down a whole discussion on a topic like
this, (and without a conclusion) on the basis of a few sub-threads
unfortunately disappearing off into the long grass.

I've renamed my reply to remove the odious Butler :-) would be a good
move; perhaps as/when we continue other discussions to do the same.

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Butler Office Pro - really a violation ?

2008-02-08 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Mathias,

On Thu, 2008-02-07 at 16:05 +0100, Mathias Bauer wrote:
 I don't want to kill the thread - I'm not even empowered to do that. :-)

Good 'oh :-) personally I think the discussion is helpful. Jurgen is
right, of course, that we discussed this 3 months ago, and that there
has been no progress in between. That itself is worth noticing - despite
the perception of activity  improvement created by Advisory Boards and
so on.

Anyhow, if we can discuss there are a few other bits worth clearing up
as well:

On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 23:54 +0100, Mathias Bauer wrote:
 Michael Meeks wrote:
  Haha :-) I once tried using OpenOffice too, it's user-interface
  was perfection: no changes welcome.
 OK, I was just pulling your leg. Sorry for that.

Of course, no need to apologise, it was amusing, good to inject some
humour :-)

  Of course you can :-) I spent some time explaining that the vast
  majority of that code is CA free (I call that eclectic ownership).
 
 How much code is CA free doesn't make a difference -

This is partially true - but re-applying this back to the interesting
case: OO.o - what then is the problem with having CA free plugins
included in the product ? :-)

 - it doesn't change the fact that only Novell is able to licence the
 whole stuff under proprietary conditions. With regard to our current
 discussion this is the identical situation as in case of OOo.

Not really; lets summarise the differences: the vast majority of the
Mono code is eclectic ownership, there is a small (and shrinking) core
that is not. Furthermore, there are replacements for the 'core' piece as
I understand it: eg. 'Portable.Net' implements their own core, and
shares the run-time libraries, or you could use an IKVM type technique
to run .Net apps on a JVM (I imagine), and at worst there is the
non-free MS runtime. Were Novell to do something truly stupid 
unreasonable with the core Mono licensing tomorrow, demanding cash /
concessions / whatever to ship / use it - there are lots of other
options.

Now consider OO.o - Sun owns everything, and insists on owning and
controlling everything, even cleanly separated components [ included in
the product ] (despite as you say) it not really making an immediate
difference to Sun's licensing stranglehold. Obviously this leaves a very
different situation if Sun decides to do something stupid tomorrow.

IMHO, representation should follow contribution, the more you
contribute - the more say  ownership you should have: that seems only
fair.

Unfortunately, this is not true of OO.o - and I was hoping for some
movement here - AB wise. A trivial and incremental way to achieve this,
without hurting Sun's licensing business (in the 1st instance), is (as I
outline) - allowing non-Sun-owned components into OO.o, under some
suitable license of Sun's choosing etc. It seems fair and extremely
reasonable. It is the sheer reasonable-ness of the proposal, combined
with it's (apparent) unequivocal rejection by Sun that concerns me most.

 If a company gave me the opportunity to get some useful open source
 software and adjust it to my needs I would gladly accept that
 wonderful opportunity and contribute my code back. That would be my
 thank you for the huge amount of work that the company already had
 invested and that gives me a benefit.

I know the argument, I used to try to persuade people of this view :-)
clearly however gratitude has its limits.

It cuts both ways: Novell, and others have contributed substantially to
OO.o, yet (apparently) Sun is unwilling to accept a wonderful
opportunity to contribute their changes to our code back to (not even
Novell of course, but some open  transparent foundation). ie. why
should the thank-yous appear to only go one-way ?

 Insinuating a participation of Sun in the case of Butler office really
 is ridiculous. *That* is the stupid part of the thread I would like to
 see stopped.

Fine :-) it would be silly anyway, now we know it's not so.

  The rest might still be boring, as it presents the same
 arguments we heard days, weeks or months ago (and probably we will
 also hear days, weeks and months later), but that's life.

Heh :-) glad you can cope.

 And as you are doing your own builds anyway where you can include
 extensions easily - why bother?

Well - ultimately, I would like to aim at working within the
OpenOffice.org project, and reducing the differences between our builds
to a minimum [ and of course, trying to ensure OO.o  our users have the
latest  greatest components / features we work on in their download ].
But as you know, the main problem is that non-inclusion of components,
appears to lead to duplication in the core.

HTH,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Butler Office Pro - really a violation ?

2008-02-07 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Mathias,

So - since you want to kill the thread, lets try to do that; but first
I must address this:

On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 23:48 +0100, Mathias Bauer wrote:
 What makes you think it could be anything else? Wow, how easy it is to
 get some public interest. It's enough to give others some reasons to
 cultivate their paranoia.

How many licensees are there of our code in OO.o, and under what
terms ? without knowing that, it's really hard to say; that is my point.
Clearly I would hope and expect that (in the absence of a compelling
commercial reason to do otherwise), Sun would act in a way to safeguard
the OO.o project, ensure that code changes get back up-stream under the
LGPL etc.

 Novell even states explicitly that this is the reason why they ask for
 a copyright assignment.

As does Sun.

 Whether Novell already does business like that (Michael
 calls it ripping off people's code) is something I don't care for.

It's amazing the concern that is suddenly shown for code that was not
written or contributed by Sun, or you, or me :-) I'm interested in the
relevant code for this forum: that contributed to OpenOffice; rather
than some wider discussion about Java, OpenSolaris, NetBeans [ or
whatever ]. Presumably each project can decide for itself.

Let me clarify ripping off, since that unfortunately ended up seeming
offensive to you. I would personally feel ripped off, if my code ended
up in a commercial product, which clearly had modified  improved that
code, and where the improvements were not available to all under the
LGPL, in OO.o.

  I just would like to stop this stupid discussion started by Michael's
 ridiculous idea that Sun would make business with a company like
 butler office. I still can't believe that this is really what he thinks.

This would have been an effective end-thread, as a #1 reply :-)

Unfortunately, reading back, it looks as if: before Martin checked with
the lawyers and confirmed that you did not have such a relationship
(thanks Martin), you argument was framed only in defense of Sun's right
to re-license our code under any terms :-)

It's good to see the principle laid out clearly: that Sun will not deal
with Butler-alikes, that it would be ridiculous to do so  I welcome
that  couldn't agree more.

Regards,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Some thoughts about our community

2007-10-11 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Mathias,

On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 10:47 +0200, Mathias Bauer wrote:
 I'm sure that he is not naive enough to believe that the rules of the
 project would be changed in a hurry just because he started his
 campaign.

IMHO it's certainly worth changing the rules to meet contributors
legitimate concerns. In a hurry ;-), probably not - but to effectively
rule out any change before OO.o 3.0 (Summer 2008) by starting a
duplication effort is unfortunate; and shows the likely outcome here.

 Nobody tries to sell anything. If people don't want to share the
 copyright with Sun, it's fine.

Unfortunately, it's not that fine - since they can't get their code
into OpenOffice.org, which totally sucks.

 Sun's StarOffice is not the reason for the JCA. We could make it even
 without it as do others with their own proprietary versions.

What are the purposes for which the JCA is necessary then ?

Which of these purposes are valuable enough to Sun, that a foundation
cannot easily fulfil them ? and lets state here that adequate funding
for a non-profit to defend the license, perform due diligence etc.
should not be an issue.

 The foundation won't solve anything.

It solves a serious transparency  trust problem around ownership.

But there's another problem. Novell never had any problems with the JCA
 for years but their contributions to OOo never came close to what you
 could expect from the number of people they claim to have assigned to
 OOo.

We claim to have 15 people working on OO.o; their names are:

Michael Meeks, Radek Doulik, Florian Reuter, Tor Lillqvist, Petr
Mladek, Noel Power, Eric Ward, Fong, Jian-Hua, Hubert Figure, Fridrich
Strba, Kohei Yoshida, Jon Prior, Zhang Yun (/contract people), Jan
Nieuwenhuizen (starting soon), and JP Rosevear (mgmt).

Perhaps some of them don't exist :-) to be sure, I've not met all of
our Chinese hackers in person. As for not contributing close to what you
expect, I am sorry to disappoint you.

It is easy (for those who have tried external development on OO.o) to
imagine many reasons why that could be. I'm personally pleased with our
level of contribution, though as newer engineers slowly get more
familiar with the code I expect the level to increase a little :-)

  And they still refuse to do anything else than hacking code what
 even more diminishes their contributions.

Eric does QA; but yes - we think that focusing on fixing  improving
the code is a strength, not a weakness. RedHat, whose work we both
appreciate, has AFAICS a similar focus on coding.

 I didn't criticize that nor did anybody else from Sun. But we expect
 that all people responsible for that move live with the consequences.

Including Sun. To pretend that Sun has no choice here is just silly ;-)
we both made a choice - I'm happy to defend mine; you seem to deny yours
was a choice, though I can understand that it was not you that chose
it :-)

 And I criticized that Kohei left out in his blog that it indeed was shown
 to Novell how this code could be contributed to OOo without a JCA. As
 Kohei explained in a comment to my blog, he wasn't aware of this option
 because those in his company who knew that didn't tell him.

This is just silly :-) It is clear Sun that is refusing to include the
code, and then doing this hostile duplication. We have all been aware of
this plug-in idea, but if this is the answer: why does Sun not simply
take the code and make it such a plugin: it should be fairly easy, Sun
(or anyone else) is free to do that any time.

We want to see our work included with OO.o by default, and ensure there
is no demotivating  wasteful duplication effort; the exact packaging
mechanics: plug-in vs. component, vs. patch are completely irrelevant to
my mind.

All the best,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Some thoughts about our community

2007-10-11 Thread Michael Meeks

On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 12:53 +0200, Philipp Lohmann wrote:
 Michael Meeks wrote:
  We claim to have 15 people working on OO.o; their names are:
  
  Michael Meeks, Radek Doulik, Florian Reuter, Tor Lillqvist, Petr
  Mladek, Noel Power, Eric Ward, Fong, Jian-Hua, Hubert Figure, Fridrich
  Strba, Kohei Yoshida, Jon Prior, Zhang Yun (/contract people), Jan
  Nieuwenhuizen (starting soon), and JP Rosevear (mgmt).
 
 Actually that makes 16. And you left out kendy.

Good grief ! how could I omit Kendy ? (particularly since, as you see
he has 2 names) - Jan Holesovsky and Kendy [ so I could have write him
twice (which perhaps matches his large contribution) ]. 

You would be amazed at the fun that can be had on phone conferences
with (now) 2 Jan's and a Jian (almost a homophone) ;-)

But you're right, we round downish - since, it seems I spent a lot of
time working on platform issues that affect OO.o, and JP is a part-time
manager on OO.o etc.

 But you know, I'm always glad to help :-)

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] proposal for change of cws policies

2007-07-05 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Martin,

On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 14:14 +0200, Martin Hollmichel wrote:
 With the help of Nikolai we are now able to provide a proposal for a
 modified version of the child workspace policies on
 http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/CWS_Policies

This looks like an improvement :-) thanks.

Under the Setting a CWS to approved by QA - since this is something
developers can do (for category B) - can you expand on the (should for
bug fixes) section - Make a test specification / test case available -
is there some repository of such things somewhere ? how is that done ?
in what form ? can this be waived in the case that a unit test exercises
the code paths ? :-)

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] uno cil bindings for linux

2007-04-19 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Daniel,

On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 19:22 -0400, Daniel Morgan wrote:
 What is the status of the uno cil bindings for mono on linux?

Radek managed to make them self-hosting in the last few weeks - by
porting climaker to C# (from C++), which is great news - and we did some
tests on Win32 / Linux to prove equivalence.

So - now it is self-hosting, I guess Debian can package the bindings in
addition to SUSE, and hopefully we can get this stuff up-stream
sometime.

Regards,

Michael.

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[dev] CWS configrefactor01 unit tests ...

2007-02-05 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Stefan,

Any chance you can help me get some skeletal unit tests setup for CWS
configrefactor01 ? I'm very happy to write nice chunks of unit test, but
getting the environment setup (and some config data to play with) is
more problematic I think. I checked in the (simple enough) testshl2
framework pieces into qa/unit/ but it's clearly not enough :-)

Of course, OO.o starts nicely and fiddling with settings works, but
clearly having unit tests would be nice.

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specs. closer to a solution

2006-11-15 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Mathias,

On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 12:39 +0100, Mathias Bauer wrote:
 Which timeouts are you talking about?

Primarily interaction with User Experience, but also Documentation,
l10n - I'd like to ensure not only that they have a clearly defined
opportunity to comment / have their say; but that their window of
opportunity here is time limited :-) 'discuss' with ... UserEx is
fundamentally synchronous, and very hard to verify later, and perhaps
open to lots of problems. Much as I hate process, I'd like to be able to
point to a mailing list post and say no replies in 2 weeks =
uncontroversial  approved.

 If QA people don't have time to test your CWS there is no way to
 workaround this. If the QA people just forgot about it you might
 need an escalation path and not a fixed timeout.

Of course, but we have our own people (or other engineers) that can do
QA - so, if there is some check with UI / Docs / l10n implied by QA
then that piece needs to be asynchronous.

  I believe Kai volunteered to write some of this up in the Wiki
  somewhere as a conclusion, so we actually move to the decision making
  phase after the lengthy discussion ;-)
 
 IMHO this could be a good reason for an ESC meeting.

Indeed :-) it'd be good to talk; perhaps best to rubber-stamp (or
recommend to the Community Council (or whatever) the draft result ?

Thanks,

Michael.

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[dev] Specs. closer to a solution

2006-11-14 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Mathias,

So - I think your summary here is great:

On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 14:41 +0100, Mathias Bauer wrote:
... snip various good points...
 So perhaps we can describe it so (with less details ;-):
 
 (1) While developing your feature: discuss feature with people on IRC,
 mailing lists and whatsoever to your liking; it is *recommended* (though
 not mandatory) to contact the project lead as early as possible and
 discuss with QA and UserEx also (not to ask for approval but to avoid
 problems by early contact!).
 
 (2) While development happens make sure that at the end you deliver a
 spec. This could be just an issue in IZ, a web page or a document,
 details can be described elsewhere. BTW: I consider having an Issue in
 IZ mandatory as we need to have a reference for cvs commits.
 
 (3) Get necessary builds (perhaps by using build bots) and hand builds
 and spec over by announcing them somewhere(we must define where!) so
 that QA, translation and documentation can start working on it.
 
 (4) React on feedback given by them, be it changing the spec, fixing a
 bug etc.

One thing - we managed to loose the timeouts here :-) since
non-responsiveness has been a bug-bear for some years, and is one of
those things that may vary substantially over time depending on mgmt
imperatives  focus, I really want those in there.

In order to have a 'fair' timeout, it's necessary to have a
time-stamped, reliable, agreed communication medium and length of
timeout: a mailing list is fine for that I guess; but it should be
specified. Possible an early 'features@' post is sufficient (?).

On the other hand - the real strength of your outline is that it is not
too rigid / specific: and can be iterated later and expanded as needed
to cover unforseen cases [ wow, have I converted you to an iterative
process development model ? ;-]

So - where do we go from here ?

I believe Kai volunteered to write some of this up in the Wiki
somewhere as a conclusion, so we actually move to the decision making
phase after the lengthy discussion ;-)

Anyhow, thanks for your time,

Regards,

Michael.

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[dev] Unit testing ...

2006-11-14 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi guys,

On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 11:27 +0100, Kay Ramme wrote:
  yes, definitely. What about a staged approach to that: first include
  all unit tests in a regular build, but _only_ perform them with a
  magic env var set (like the debug=true stanza)?

 good idea, that would at least make it obvious how to trigger the tests ...

Right, knowing how to run these tests (and that they exist) is at least
a large part of the problem. Of course, if more people run them then we
get more tests, and the tests don't tend to bit-rot so quickly.

I looked at the nice list of tests on the architecture page, dived
straight into one:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Uno/Cpp/Module/CPPUhelper/test

I tried the 1st test, since the instruction list for the 2nd set of
tests looked long  scary ;-) [ and presumably would be better expressed
as a simple 'check:' dmake rule instead of a hand-typed recipe ].

The result:

$ cd cppuhelper/qa/propertysetmixin/
$ dmake
... snip a surprising amount of successful building ...
g++ -fmessage-length=0 -c -Os -fno-strict-aliasing   ... -o 
test_propertysetmixin.o

/opt/OpenOffice/src680-m187/cppuhelper/qa/propertysetmixin/test_propertysetmixin.cxx
 
/opt/OpenOffice/src680-m187/solver/680/unxlngi6.pro/inc/cppunit/TestAssert.h: 
In static member function ‘static _STL::string 
CppUnit::assertion_traitsT::toString(const T) [with T = rtl::OUString]’:
/opt/OpenOffice/src680-m187/solver/680/unxlngi6.pro/inc/cppunit/TestAssert.h:100:
   instantiated from ‘void CppUnit::TestAssert::assertEquals(const T, const 
T, CppUnit::SourceLine, const _STL::string) [with T = rtl::OUString]’
/opt/OpenOffice/src680-m187/cppuhelper/qa/propertysetmixin/test_propertysetmixin.cxx:407:
   instantiated from here
/opt/OpenOffice/src680-m187/solver/680/unxlngi6.pro/inc/cppunit/TestAssert.h:50:
 error: ambiguous overload for ‘operator’ in ‘ost  x’
/opt/OpenOffice/src680-m187/solver/680/unxlngi6.pro/inc/stl/stl/_ostream.h:96: 
note: candidates are: _STL::basic_ostream_CharT, _Traits 
_STL::basic_ostream_CharT, _Traits::operator(unsigned char) [with _CharT = 
char, _Traits = _STL::char_traitschar] near match
...

Of course, it's possible that my environment is just twisted up in some
strange way of my own construction ;-) however the install from this
build works I believe so ...

Naturally it's unfair to infer that the unit tests are all broken 
under-used on the basis of the 1st one tried ;-) but ... having a
standard way to run all included unit tests [ eg. at the end of a
BuildBot build ] would be really rather useful.

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Unicode---Give us all of it!

2006-11-14 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Kay,

On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 10:53 +0100, Kay Ramme wrote:
 Michael Meeks wrote:
  There's no chance then of switching to UTF-8 as an underlying string
  representation :-) and saving a measurable chunk of our string
  overhead ?

 this is certainly possible by introducing a new string (I mean exactly 
 _one_ string), which IMHO should address some other points I 
 investigated into (see 
 http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Uno/Binary/Analysis/String_Performance).
  

An interesting paper.

 This new string should also be opaque, so that internal data 
 representation could use the most beneficial format available (which 
 might be UTF8). Unfortunately, this would be incompatible and quite a 
 big chunk of work.

Well - of course, a big chunk of work is less work if we break it down
 do it slowly while doing other things [ like this string re-work
task ;-]. As a first step, (perhaps) while doing this change we should
remove:

operator const sal_Unicode *() const SAL_THROW(()) { return pData-buffer; }
const sal_Unicode * getStr() const SAL_THROW(()) { return pData-buffer; }

And replace them with an inlined [] operator, or better an iterator
API:

* Pro:
+ no performance impact
+ useful for identifying problems with sal_Unicode usage
+ doesn't break ABI compat for existing plugins
+ helps wrt. privatising the internals
* Con:
+ some source/API compat breakage

This then would give us some flexibility to (perhaps) do more
interesting things later with our internal string class.

Just a thought,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specifications - summary suggestions ...

2006-11-13 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Joerg,

On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 12:40 +0100, Joerg Sievers wrote:
  + specifications are critical for (at a minimum):
  + file formats
  + complex / unfamiliar behaviours

 + behaviour changes affecting other's work (e.g. the automated
 gui testing is extremely dependent to the basics of OOo)

hokay - well, this can easily be amortised by partitioning the tests
such that it is easy/fast to run the tests on the piece of GUI code you
changed to verify they are still perfect before marking the CWS 'Ready
for QA', and/or writing guidelines on how best to avoid breaking the GUI
test tool, and/or improving the GUI test tool  code so it is less
fragile under test :-) [ string names for key widgets eg. ]. Clearly a
situation where the regression tests are fragile over small UI changes,
require lots of maintenance and produce lots of false positives is in
no-one's interest. Presumably also getting lots of developers to run the
tests themselves  try to analyse the output may result in more interest
in improving the test framework itself.

  + we need to be able to execute these way more
quickly:  ~2 hours, to get yes/no answers on
individual CWS' faster.
 
 On it's way, You can directly contact me for an update.

Great; that's good news indeed; thank you.

  + Wiki
  + using a wiki for specs allows easier spec editing
and construction and maintenance
 
 Don't think so, but there is now one. Try to design UI in it and you 
 will love .odt :-)

As I've said before, I am certain that the process of designing a UI is
best done either in a UI Engineers head, or on some paper, or even
better with several iterative prototype models and filmed  analysed
studies of test subjects using each etc. The spec. document should not
be used as part of a workflow, but -only- to communicate relevant
information about the finished result to interested parties; hence my
desire to remove the IMHO unhelpful iTeaming aspect.

HTH,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Unicode---Give us all of it!

2006-11-10 Thread Michael Meeks

On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 17:12 +0100, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
 This indicates that an application's concept of character is often
 best represented by a programming environment's concept of string.

An interesting insight indeed.

 Use sal_uInt32 to represent individual Unicode encoded characters and 
 add any necessary base functionality to rtl::OUString (e.g., operating 
 on the individual Unicode encoded characters represented by an instance 
 of rtl::OUString).

There's no chance then of switching to UTF-8 as an underlying string
representation :-) and saving a measurable chunk of our string
overhead ?

Interesting mail anyhow,

Regards,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specification Process Possibilities ... what about a wiki?

2006-11-02 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Christian,

On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 00:47 +0100, Christian Lohmaier wrote:
 But surely the specification needs to be final or stable or
 whatever you want to call it before the code gets into the master.

Sure - it needs to be in a good state of agreement with the code,
although as we know, currently the specs bit-rot drastically as soon as
we get past this point.

 So adjusting the spec as your likings after throwing random junks of
 code into the tree is not what I have in mind when talking about
 wiki-based specifications.

Nor me :-) clearly throwing random junks of code into HEAD is stupid.

 And if you need to change your whole feature multiple times, then you
 ought to thing before. (and again this doesn't relate on how to actually
 code it, but on what the feature is supposed to do)

Anyone that thinks they can sit down and design a perfect system and
then implement it, without some (perhaps substantial) degree of
iterative fixing is [ I think ] deluding themselves. When I worked with
hardware design, it was -unheard-of- for revision A. hardware to work
without modifications. [ the hardware design flow including a ton of
design, simulation, review, etc. ].

There are some great examples of unsatisfactory usability in OO.o that
have specifications ( I guess packed with screenshots to match :-).
There are other great examples of all-out-over-design around the code,
where an iterative approach would have saved both time, money,
complexity etc.

I don't expect to convince you that iterative development is a good
idea for you, it seems you prefer a cathedral approach :-) but at least,
it appears to work out rather well for other people.

All the best,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] OO.o / Win32 startup profiles ...

2006-11-02 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Malte,

On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 13:28 +0100, Malte Timmermann wrote:
 I don't have any current numbers, sorry.

Hokay, I'll try to generate some then, I have them only for Linux.

 A good profiler for Windows is Intel VTune, evals can be downloaded.

I'll boing MikeLeib about that again - Mike ? I could really use a
gratis / full copy of VTune :-)

 Does the Novell build contain more optimizations than the standard
 build? Is it compiled/linked differently?

Sure - i#63927 is rather significant on Linux, and not up-stream yet,
also I guess i#66680, and i#66679 are useful, our other wins are mostly
targetted at cold-start though, where the difference to Win32 is
somewhat smaller.

 Would you like to also measure the standard build on your machine?

Can do, will download it and have a go, (only warm start numbers though
for now).

Regards,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] An attempt of a summary: specification process possibilities

2006-11-02 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Mathias,

Sorry - didn't notice your summary before posting mine. OTOH - yours
looks rather better than mine, thanks so much for taking the time here.
OTOH - I make some more concrete proposals, so perhaps there is some
value in discussing both in the same thread.

It really helps me to keep at least one of thread-ids or subjects
constant wrt. tracking the discussion.

 Is that a basis for further considerations? Did I miss
 something important?

Nope, seems a good summary; one of the ideas I came up with was of
splitting the work-flow aspects [ step1: create iTeam, step2: design,
step 3: review, step 4: implement ] etc. from the other pieces that are
necessary for QA / docs / i18n etc. ie. providing separate guidelines
for how teams can function, and develop software vs. what information /
approvals are necessary to get changes included in the product.

Anyhow - thanks again,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specification Process Possibilities ... what about a wiki?

2006-11-01 Thread Michael Meeks

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 17:42 +0100, Christian Lohmaier wrote:
 I disagree. Esp. when the UI is changed significantly the UI-mockups are
 necessary. Both for finding flaws in the proposed design as well as for
 documentation.

I'm well up for the UI team doing mock-ups and communicating those to
the developer, makes perfect sense. Of course, what comes out in the
product may not be like the mockups, hopefully it's even better - so why
enshrine the mockup process in a formal document ?

 I'm sure nobody expects you to do a pixel-accurate mockup, but again the
 user-interaction part should be clearly visualized.

Sure - and of course UI is important.

Snip some good quick-starter related questions - sure - all of these
things can be easily added to an unstructured wiki page / FAQ, that can
be built up as people ask the questions.

  In this scenario, a spec cannot be used to verify the
  implementation, because the implementation is done first.
 
 Well, you can still see whether what you coded actually is what you
 thought it would do (i.e. what you coded is what you wrote down in the
 spec).

But we didn't write down a spec. We conceived of the idea, then
implemented it, now we have it. The original conception of course was
prolly inaccurate, no-one gets things right 1st time, we most likely
have a solution that is now far better than that, similarly we are now
probably aware of the various limitations of the current approach, and
various next steps / future development to do.

  It is true that you miss the find errors in the planning phase
 (but again I don't think you start coding without having planned the
 changed first, so no gain/no loss)

The problem is that there is a very large difference between conceiving
an idea and writing it down as prose (with pictures); you can conceive
of things almost instantly, writing a general document for an uncertain
audience is very time consuming.

Anyhow,

Good stuff,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specification Process Possibilities ... - unit testing

2006-11-01 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Christian,

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 17:54 +0100, Christian Lohmaier wrote:
  An unfair cite.

;-) lets look at the context  contention:

 On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 23:57 +0100, Mathias Bauer wrote:
   You mix up some things here. Nobody said that we need a spec for
 each and every tiny ergonomic fix. 
^^^

 On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 02:27:23PM +, Michael Meeks wrote:
  I refer you to the Sun rubric ** emphasis added.
...
  I Want to Change Something in OpenOffice.org - Do I Have to
   Write a Software Specification? 
   **In general the answer is YES**. This applies to:
   Features, Enhancements, **Defects**

That page appears to say nothing to exclude tiny ergonomic fixes (for
defects) from the spec. process, -) Indeed they are clearly in the
Behavioral changes of the UI. I think the current thrust of the
process is clear here.

 An unfair cite.

 it is Defects **requiring the following type of changes**: list of 
 criteria

You don't cite include the relevant criteria either :-)

Regards,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specification Process Possibilities ... - unit testing

2006-10-31 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Mathias,

Once again thank you for your thought provoking mail.

On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 23:57 +0100, Mathias Bauer wrote:
 You mix up some things here. Nobody said that we need a spec for each
 and every tiny ergonomic fix. We need them for new features - e.g. a
 quickstarter on Linux. :-P

I refer you to the Sun rubric ** emphasis added.

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Category:Specification

I Want to Change Something in OpenOffice.org - Do I Have to
 Write a Software Specification? 
 **In general the answer is YES**. This applies to:
 Features, Enhancements, **Defects**

Now, of course we could explicitly exclude more things from this, which
would be good - but AFAICS - at least as of now, each tiny ergonomic
change requires -at-least- a round-trip to the team lead.

 So we have parts in the code that are unit-testable (and we have
 tests for it) but most code unfortunately is bound to some
 vcl/sfx/svx/etc. stuff that makes unit testing impossible.

Great - so, what pieces of code have functioning unit tests ? whenever
I hack on a module I like to try and find these tests, I poke in
'workben' and I see very frequently stale/un-buildable/un-runable code,
then I poke in qa/ and eg. in configmgr/qa/unoapi I see a makefile.mk I
'dmake' that, something happens and it barfs:

Exception in thread main java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
org/openoffice/Runner
dmake:  Error code 1, while making 'ALLTAR'

it appears broken out of the box.

I would -Love- to have a good, standardised unit testing framework in
place to add tests to, and let us re-factor code more aggressively with
confidence. However - I just don't see anything here.

 The long duration of the tests is indeed a problem.

Yep, and something we need to fix of course; hopefully some of Noel's
work on the performance of StarBasic's may help here.

 We are currently investigating how we can get faster tests, one
 direction we are looking into is avoiding or at least reducing the
 idle/sleeping times.

Yep - of course, understanding why these idle times are there would be
good I guess.

  Other ideas are welcome. My very personal opinion
 is that we should have more API (code) based tests and less GUI testtool
 based ones but I know that there are other opinions. Must be discussed.

Well; of course from a 'community' perspective - I'm well up for adding
in-source, in-CWS, standardized, fast unit-tests. eg. reading the calc
'R1C1' work recently, I was itching to write a test-suite, that would
simply exercise this piece of the calc code  parse 100 formulae of
varying complexity and validate that the results were correct.

Unfortunately it's -really- difficult to do that.

 There's nothing wrong with doing unit and API tests in Java.

As long as they are easy to run with some standard command, I don't
much care what they're written in.

 And UNO components don't make anything more complicated

Au contraire - if you have built all of OO.o up to 'sc' (eg.) and you
now want to write a very small, very fast unit test to exercise just the
formula parsing piece - you have a nightmare. Somehow, you have to get
OO.o alive enough to actually start, bootstrap etc. you need to build a
custom .rdb file [ we have ugly unsustainable hacks in 'workben'
directories around the place to do some of this ]. You can't even read a
file in without having an huge types.rdb, services.rdb, a ton of paths
set right and a big piece of boilerplate code etc. etc. :-) AFAICS it's
a huge pain.

Of course - if there was an existing small/light/simple infrastructure
that tests could be easily added to, then I for one would write more
unit tests: this gap has frustrated me on the 2/3 times I've actually
wanted to sit down  write a block of test code. [ And really, arguably,
people should be writing the torture tests as they write the code ].

The other problem with UNO is you can only test what is exposed via.
UNO, and that is not enough to torture the internals often.

 Or is there anything you find more complicated in unit testing of UNO
 components? Then please give an example.

It's possible my horrific past experience of UNO bootstrapping is now
obsolete :-) if so, wonderful. I'm looking for a solution that doesn't
require installation, can be run in the source tree very simply with
'dmake check' (eg.) and will run through a list of test modules, build
them, execute them, and report their output; and wrt. VCL - having a
live X/GUI connection, at least for now is just fine. Preferably being
able to automate this fully (on each CWS before it's nominated) would be
ideal.

 You again mix things here. This is no longer true for fixes in 2.0. And
 nobody asks for specs for bug fixes. Please give examples where a bug
 fix was not integrated because a spec was missing.

It depends what you see as a bug. I see something being 

Re: [dev] Specification Process Possibilities ...

2006-10-31 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Thorsten,

Thanks for your mail - this is good stuff.

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 10:45 +0100, Thorsten Ziehm wrote:
 Yes the specification process was introduced in OOo 2.0 time frame.
 But it doesn't work, as you said. The bug count was high in OOo 2.0.
 Therefore a template for specifications were developed to eliminate
 the most important faults.

Sure - I just don't think that (given the mixed results of the initial
spec. process to substantially improve quality) it's possible to
authoritatively state that increases in code quality post 2.0.0 are due
to the [new] spec. process itself. So much changed (for the better),
it's hard to say where the dominant effects are.

  I think this is one reason why OpenOffice.org is so successful.
  Do you have data to back that up ?

 It isn't possible to get data here. But from my own feeling and
 discussion with many people, quality is the highest priority.

Of course, anecdotally I have a different slant :-) to measure this -
if we do user surveys we could perhaps work out some questions to ask
that would measure this (though it's hard to phrase them I suppose):

What did you notice most about OO.o 2.0
a) better interop
b) new Impress layout
c) improved stability
...

it'd be interesting to see the result. [ I thought Sun did market
research of this form, perhaps Erwin has some hard data ].

  OO.o is incredibly slow to start
 
 Yes this is a bug. But I think it is more than one bug.

:-) indeed.

 Unit tests and tests with automated TestTool are different level of
 quality assurance in Software. Unit tests are used to check the code
 itself. The next level are API tests to check the integrated code
 in the whole content.

Sure - of course, being able to run large numbers of very complex tests
very quickly inside a local developer's build tree is clearly a good
goal, and (I hope) quite attainable.

  So - I need a deeper understanding of what you understand
 by quality and how you weight these statements:

This was very interesting indeed, and broadly I agree with you, so
perhaps we're not so far apart at all :-)

 User perspective  :
 In my opinion we had the following goals in the last updates.
 (I changed the order of your points)
 
  + Quality is OO.o not crashing (stability)
  + Quality is OO.o not loosing data
  + Quality is OO.o loading  saving my 'foreign' data files
  + Quality is OO.o performing acceptably
  + Quality is OO.o not consuming all available memory

And we don't do too badly with the above.

  + Quality is OO.o behaving ergonomically as I expect
  + Quality is OO.o being slick  beautiful
  + Quality is OO.o being feature competitive with others

I guess these last 3 are what the spec. process targets, and of course
prolly where we need the most extra polish all over the place.
Unfortunately wrt. slickness the large number of small changes to make
OO.o 'slick' [ a vague term it's true ], are substantially retarded by
the spec. process - which concerns me.

 Code contributor perspective  :
 These are important points too. These are and should be goals for
 the development. I cannot speak about that, because I am not
 the professional in code quality.
 
  + Quality is OO.o source code being readable
  + Quality is OO.o source code being maintainable
  + Quality is OO.o source code being consistent
  + Quality is OO.o source code not being cut/pasted

So - here we can perhaps use automated lint style tools to help [ eg.
the warnings redux work is really useful here I think ], we could also
(perhaps) use one or other of the cut/paste detection tools to generate
a metric before/afterwards and point out the delta. The other bits can
only be improved by code review I think.

 The quality (user and developer perspective) can be increased with
 specifications. But specifications are not a part of the quality.
 
  + Quality is every aspect of OO.o having a detailed spec.

And this is the wonderful. It's great that you view the spec. process
not as an end in itself, but one tool to achieve greater quality in
certain circumstances. Of course - ultimately it's clear that we both
want a higher quality end-user product, and we just need good processes
that encourage contributions that (we can be sure) raise the quality to
get into the main-line as fast as possible.

Regards,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specification Process Possibilities ...

2006-10-30 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Thorsten,

On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 13:23 +0200, Thorsten Ziehm wrote:
 Nobody said, that it is needed to include _burdensome_ processes
 to get a higher quality.

Wonderful, so making the process less burdensome is possible. Great -
so, lets get the design requirements for the specification process all
collated in 1 place, and then try to make a much less burdensome
process :-)

 All over in the industry you see processes and control mechanisms.
 Without that we are not in such a high living standards. So why the
 Software industry and OpenOffice.org should give up processes and
 control mechanisms?

Did I say we should give up our high living standards ? ;-) of course
we need -some- process; ideally though it should be one that is minimal
[ ie. requires the minimum effort to achieve the maximum benefit ], and
simple to use. Furthermore, there needs to be a get-out clause for
external contributors, at least for their first N features, and
finally it needs to not rely on people being responsive :-)

 That the quality is still not good you are right in some cases. Yes we 
 have still more then 9000 issues open. Nearly 6500 issues are defects. 
 But in my opinion OpenOffice.org 2.x is more stable and is more usable
 and more bug free than ever.

From my experience (of back-porting, sometimes critical, fixes from the
680 branch back to OO.o 1.1.x) the -primary- driver of improved quality
in OO.o 2.0.x has been the switch to frequent releases, and not the
introduction of painful, and change inhibiting processes. The frequent
release means that people do their fix once and get it included in the
product shortly afterwards, instead of having to worry if it's critical
enough to get back-ported.

As for the quality of OO.o 2.0.0 [ created AFAIR after the
specification process was introduced ], I think it was a fairly
'interesting' release (defect wise), hence the compound slippage etc.

 I think this is one reason why OpenOffice.org is so successful.

Do you have data to back that up ?

 If somebody think the quality isn't high enough, why they are working on
 new features and why they are not working on fixing bugs?

Perhaps their bugs are of the form:

OO.o is incredibly slow to start

:-) is that not a bug ? or perhaps they are bugs about ergonomic
problems - is it fixing a bug or adding a feature to make some minor
(unusable) corner case usable ?

 That's not the point. It isn't possible to check the quality of all
 integrated code by the Sun QA team.

Which is strange. At least, from where I stand we need more quality
[ by which I mean all-around polish ] not less; from a UI perspective we
need thousands of tiny ergonomic fixes all over the place: almost all of
them trivial in and of themselves; but if each one requires a multi-page
specification, they will never get done.

Furthermore, I find the quality of the QA tests generally rather poor.
My recollection (which may be wildly astray) is that broadly there is a
large list of StarBasic test cases [ which is good ], but many of these
are known to fail / spit warnings, they take several (3+) -days- to run
(mostly with the machine idle / sleeping), and they're not particularly
reliable :-) [ is that unfair ? ]

Good unit testing [ as in I can run dmake check in configmgr and get
a yes/no answer in a few seconds ], such as I've implemented in previous
projects I've worked on [eg. the several thousand lines of unit test in
ORBit2] is invaluable. It helps re-factoring, it improves quality and
confidence in the product, and so on. Of course UNO components
substantially complicate such unit testing in OO.o (along with
(apparently) a love of only testing what can be tested via UNO, from
Java ;-). At least, I've not been able to understand the useful / common
recipe for running do tests or whatever in a given source directory 
getting useful data - I'd love to be shown how this works.

 One point was not understood over years at StarOffice team at Sun and 
 other software products around the world. The Quality Assurance cannot
 bring quality into the product. The developers bring the quality into
 the code and the QA have to make regression testing.

So - if maintaining a constant quality level is what matters would you
trade higher quality code (ie. peer reviewed code) for some reduction in
of code-duplication-as-paper-work [ the spec. burden ] ?

 I learned from the past quality takes time. If you want to have
 quick fixes and changes into a code line, the quality will decrease.
 What do you want to have, a product with higher quality or a product
 with much more features and changes ?

The problem is you are retarding not just features, but fix inclusion.
This was dramatically the case with the old-style 1.1.x branch: the cost
 penalty of back-porting *fixes* was so high that only very
infrequently did people bother to actually do it, consequently the
quality 

Re: [dev] The QuickStarter Spec.

2006-10-30 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Frank,

On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 09:58 +0100, Frank Schönheit wrote:
 Right, the specification is not ... really comprehensive here. Which,
 technically, is a bug in the specification document ;)

Thankfully the code works :-) But the very concept of rampant
duplication of state all over the place is at root broken IMHO. Having
unnecessary screenshots, duplicating bi-lingual strings etc. adds
[AFAICS] nothing at all to an existing impl, but a huge amount of pain
in terms of re-synchronising things.

 I don't have an answer to this. I still think the document has its
 value. But from certain of you comments, especially the repeated example
 of self stultifying arguments, I suppose you won't accept when I say I
 think that we're learning by doing. In specifications as well as in
 coding ;)

Well; clearly the argument that at least with a spec. QA can know what
the impl. should do is shown to be almost totally bogus :-) it's
possible that spec.s are good for -something-, but we should find what
that something is, and only do that - rather than trying to replicate
War  Peace [ with pictures ], before changing a single string ;-)

  * Why does it matter that it's broken ?
...
 I cannot but agree here. Reading [EMAIL PROTECTED], you might notice that I
 repeatedly argued that specification documents become increasingly
 useless over time, if they're not embedded in some system to ensure that
 they (means: we have a chance to keep them) up-to-date. A document
 management system, in particular, which for instance allows to search
 for the spec covering the functionality I am going to change.

Sure - the wiki is a reasonable choice here. That at least cuts a good
few steps out of the painful process [ wrt. finding where spec.s are
committed, checking stuff in / out etc. ].

 However, I fear you won't like this idea, and label it is even more
 bureaucracy.

Well, the main problem with the spec. process - beside the specs being
way too verbose ('Complete'), is the latency problem. It's all very well
soliciting input from all  sundry, but if they ~never respond life
becomes very painful indeed; particularly if you just invested a ton of
effort in trying to please people - who having done this - turn out not
to be at all interested.

An asynchronous work-flow, whereby an Engineer can implement a
feature / fix, knock up a quick wiki page describing it, commit it to a
CWS, assign it to QA, mail the dev@ui.openoffice.org list about it, and
get on with his next task would be ideal. Of course, U.E. could poke at
the wiki/issue (if they were interested  had time), otherwise it would
just proceed, QA likewise could ask questions / extend the wiki page
describing the change (if at all necessary), otherwise they could focus
on the real grist of the implementation.

So - I'm not against writing -something- down, but lets make it
absolutely minimal. Matthias Heutsch had a nice flow based on the
Solaris process that included a streamlined fast track for
'uncontroversial' changes; codifying that (and a load of timeouts for
comments) would substantially improve things.

HTH,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specification Process Possibilities ... what about a wiki?

2006-10-30 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Mathias,

So, while broadly agreeing with most of what you say:

On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 08:53 +0100, Mathias Bauer wrote:
 Without the spec the QA wouldn't be able to even find bugs in
 many cases (with the exception of obvious ones).

We hear this a lot. And, now we know that specifications are frequently
inaccurate, buggy / out of sync with the code anyway. So - I'm having
problems understanding what -exactly- QA need here. It'd help to have 10
representative examples of times when a specification has actually
helped distinguish between bugs  features, and what was done with that
information [ writing tests / whatever ].

Perhaps with some good examples to analyse here, it'd be easier to
understand some of the rational. 

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specification Process Possibilities ...

2006-10-27 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Frank,

Sorry to spam you with yet another huge E-mail, this is quite an
effective technique known as argument by exhaustion ;-)

On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 09:48 +0200, Frank Schönheit wrote:
 I agree with you that those hurdles experienced by contributors are a
 big reason for not attracting more developers.

Good 'oh :-) and of course, so do we - and various people are trying to
fix them: trying to make the BuildBot work well is a prime example. What
I want is to be able to test CWS builds easily on Win32 - since that's a
problematic platform for me (and virtually all Free software
developers), it requires proprietary tooling to get anywhere, and well -
it's of course critical that it's not broken. Contrary to popular belief
I don't like to break the build / code :-)

 All I can seriously recomment is: keep fighting. Both for people from
 outside Sun as well as inside Sun :).

Thanks for the encouragement :-)

 I will do myself, as I did in the past, since I heartly believe that we
 cannot throw all full-blown processes at a newcomer who does a small
 fix/feature.

Right - and of course, I'm to some extent preaching to the choir here,
you've done some great work in this area in the past.

 This doesn't mean those processes/requirements are unnecessary or
 stupid, it just means that we should allow people to grow and learn, and
 not do everything right and complete in the first step.

Ah - in itself it doesn't mean the processes/requirements are *not*
unnecessary or stupid either ;-) Simply because you can think of 10 good
reasons for a process, doesn't mean that that there are not many other
more weighty reasons for not using it.

  Well - my attitude here is rather different :-) in the time that it
  took to create the CWS, commit the code, go through QA etc. I had in
  parallel done a number of other improvements / fixes, and subsequently
...
 Well, and that's a fundamental misunderstanding on your side, sorry.
 
 That's explicitly *not* how OpenOffice.org works. The whole idea of
 child workspaces is closely coupled to the idea of having a stable
 master build. In ideal, we would be able to ship every master build (in
 reality, that's not the case, but we're much better than some years ago).

Interesting. I don't know how you square that with the state the code
is in, and (even) some of the things that people commit to it [ even
with specs ;-].

 That's an explicitly stated goal of the OpenOffice.org project: We don't
 break the master, we finish implementations in a child workspace, until
 they're really finished.

It's a worthy goal, ultimately though - no matter how much QA you put
into something, you won't find some bugs until it is deployed. And I was
aware of -no- bugs in the feature when it went it ( I am of course
now ;-) only some areas for future work: so what does 'finished' mean ?

It's interesting  instructive to head to LXR  search for TODO:

http://go-oo.org/lxr/search?string=TODO

'handle error', 'error handling', 'Check return value', 'introduce
error handling', 'still needed?' ... ...

 Other projects have other means for ensuring quality. For instance,
 Mozilla has a *very* rigid code review process. OpenOffice.org's mean
 for ensuring quality is the finish it on a child workspace policy.
 There's no room here for put it in and let it evolve.

I would be amazed if we actually managed to get any non-trivial piece
of code through to HEAD that had no defects found in it later.

 You might want to question this idea and policy, but please not by
 silently undermining it.

Pah ;-) as I said, it was a less feature-full implementation, not a
(known) buggy one. And I think it's a legitimate decision.

 However, what I really *really* like about this process is the exchange
 of ideas and arguments. In my experience, sitting down (or meeting in
 IRC) with a small (!) number of people having experience with and/or
 interest in a particular feature is invaluable. You always gain insights
 you wouldn't have had alone. And finally, this means you deliver a
 better feature.

I wholeheartedly agree with the above. -Clearly- it is important to
talk to people skilled in the area of artwork, HCI, etc. etc. and to
some extent the more advice you can get the better. However - if you
hand out veto's to everyone, and then each communication round-trip
takes even days, life is not good.

I think the problem here is that the specification process also tries
to make a rigid mould into which to pour basic team activity 
interactions. The book I'm currently reading on building good teams
(Peopleware) tends to emphasise the stifling nature of methodology, and
homogoneity - and encourages diversity. ie. If your team happens to
communicate best by semaphore, and works only between 2am and 5am -
then, if they do great work, perhaps it's worth accommodating them
without feeling threatened :-)


[dev] Specification Process Possibilities ...

2006-10-24 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Frank,

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 13:12 +0200, Frank Schönheit - wrote:
 To me, this whole discussions seems to be about the
 
   bring it in quick (and sometimes dirty)
 vs.
   bring it in slow, but matured (though sometimes still dirty)

Well - it looks like that on the face of it. However - while I
absolutely loathe the process, I can (perhaps) live with it - if it
actually worked :-) Sadly it is totally dysfunctional. If 1 (one)
interaction can take of the order of months to occur, the spec. process
which mandates another order of magnitude more interactions, puts any
feature inclusion into the multiple year time frame. My problem
primarily is with responsiveness  inclusion.

 You prefer the first one, as you said often enough. I continue to
 think that the second one might bring more than it costs, *if* applied
 properly. I might be wrong here, but that's still not proven to me).
 Plus, that's a big, fuzzy if, admittedly.

Cool, I'm glad you're willing to accept there might be different
(perhaps just as valid) answers to the same question :-) And of course -
from my perspective the only certain way to ensure that the process is
applied properly is to have no process :-) On the other hand, I often
hear this wonderful (circular) argument it goes like this:

them: We need this burdensome process for Higher Quality !
us:   But lets face it quality is still not good
them: Then we need -even-more- burdensome process !
  repeat ad nauseum.

The 1st step here is to realise that perhaps there are other self
referential world views that also lead to better quality, and to tackle
the issue from 1st principles again, recognise the local maximum we're
at - and try to peer around the energy surface to see if we can see any
other big peaks around that would get us higher :-)

 The problem is: We need to find a consensus in the OpenOffice.org
 project as a whole, and all your sarcasm doesn't change this.

Well, (apparently) my sarcasm has at least got people to discuss this
problem that has been festering, un-fixed for some years now. My feeling
is that some parts of Sun are in fact eager for the process to be
burdensome - precisely to raise the barrier to entry, and ensure that
(to their mind) only the best work gets included. To my mind this is a
tragedy and a sure-fire recipe for continuing to not attract any
developers. I sometimes think that some people are also in fact quite
pleased that eg. it's impossibly difficult for the average developer to
build on 2 platforms before getting their CWS included, (which would
explain the almost total lack of action wrt. making this easier to do).

 Or are there chances we find a compromise?

I'd love to find a compromise, but this has to be part of a bigger
discussion as to why OpenOffice.org is failing to attract a meaningful
developer community - and who owns that problem; or if it even is a
problem. (There seems to be substantial doubt in a lot of people's minds
here).

There also appears to be a free labour perception of volunteers in
certain places: that these people can be asked to do arbitrarily
unpleasant things, and that they will do them. I'd like to persuade
people this is (emphatically, and clearly) not the case. That if Sun QA
wants to include all this process for Quality reasons, then -it- must
shoulder the burden [ at least for volunteer contributions ].
Ultimately, I'm not unhappy to have a mega-ton of specifications that
few people if anyone read, and an ongoing maintenance nightmare of
keeping them in-sync with the code as long as I don't have to pour my
resources down this particular black hole :-)

 [1] Did I mention your port doesn't work as expected for me? After the
 first start, I have a quickstarter. After closing it, I never get it
 back, again, not even with checking the respective option in the
 menu.

This is in fact a 'feature' of the Win32 quick-starter too :-)
Basically the option is not instant apply, consequently you need to
re-start OO.o to see the effects. Similarly (reading the code) it seems
it's likely that another bug filed (i#70484) also afflicts Win32 users
but they didn't notice ;-)

 Somehow I think this particular feature *should* have had some
 more QA, in other words: some involvement of more parties.

Well - my attitude here is rather different :-) in the time that it
took to create the CWS, commit the code, go through QA etc. I had in
parallel done a number of other improvements / fixes, and subsequently
then fixed a number of other issues which were kindly reported when (you
guys) started using it in the milestone - all of which are committed to
gtkquickstart2 - which FWIW improves the usability, makes the settings
instant apply, etc. and starts to be a rather nice solution.
Unfortunately it may be mired in the process perhaps indefinitely
[ unless some friendly QA person wants to help out ].


Re: [dev] Quickstarter on Linux

2006-10-24 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Bjoern,

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 13:00 +0200, Frank Schönheit - wrote:
  But, coming back to a more technical stand-point, how does this work?
 
 Don't know. Michael said he simply ported the existing Windows code

Basically yes, there is an empty OO.o window running in the background
all the time - it burns some MB certainly, it also saves a lot of
cold-start time for an average office worker I think [ clearly not us ].

Of course, whether it should be enabled by default is an interesting
question; it is not for our Linux builds, is it possible there is some
difference in the Sun build system in this area ? [not got to the bottom
there - just turned it off for Sun].

HTH,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specification Process Possibilities ...

2006-10-24 Thread Michael Meeks

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 16:19 +0200, Frank Schönheit - wrote:
 (separating out the following from the more general discussion)

:-)

 I meant what I said: never. Not even restarting OOo gives me back the
 quickstarter. Well, not really never: When I erase my OOo user data
 directory I get it back, but that's not really something I'd do with my
 production installation :)

Oh wow, that's really silly; honestly though I have no idea how it
manages to be on by default for you :-) the code that does this is
(pseudo-code) sfx2/source/appl/shutdownicon.cxx:

bool ShutdownIcon::GetAutoStart()
..
return fileExists (~/.config/autostart/qstart.desktop)

It's not that clear to me how it can possibly be finding that .desktop
file there post 1st install; that is unless you have some other
'qstart.desktop' for some other program that is autostarted [ I guess
it's not the world's most unique name ].

Any ideas ? what's in that directory ? and/or does it exist ? what are
the permissions ? could you open an issue ? an strace/truss of the
process over attempting to re-enable the quick-starter would be most
helpful; also OS wise - I guess this is Solaris - is that so ?

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Specification Process Possibilities ...

2006-10-24 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Uwe,

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 16:51 +0200, Uwe Fischer wrote:
 so you introduced a cool new feature (by surprise to me), and then some 
 people told you that it's not up to the normal procedures to do so, 
 and now you disabled that feature for Sun builds?

:-) basically yes, although of course my CWS doing that is not even
QA'd yet.

 I would like you to stand up and fight a little bit more for your 
 feature! Well, fighting is not even necessary, just do not kill the 
 feature because of some complaining mails.

Heh ;-) Thanks for your encouragement.

 The current state is that I hurried to get the new feature explained in 
 the Help files, and now I must run to revert those changes again?
 This is no fun.

Well, here is the problem - in order to (properly) fix the lifecycle
issue that various people noticed, it was necessary to change a string
(since the check-button enable systray quickstarter now has immediate
effect as you disable it - ie. pointless for it to be a
check-button ;-). So the label is now different - we break the string
and UI freeze = I assume it's easier for everyone to just disable it
(hiding a string / some UI), and we can think again for 2.2.

Also Frank's bug / people's observation that it starts by default is
somewhat surprising and unexpected  makes it rather less a niche
feature, I'm not that happy about that; it needs tracking down to the
bitter end  fixing.

 And what must a user do to see the new feature if he/she has a Sun build?

Sit  hope Sun will include it (after the relevant rigorous
specification process foo etc.) was the general idea.

So I feel bad to have caused you so much extra work. If you tell me
what CWS your changes are in - perhaps I can back them out for you as a
patch ? [ though not for 2 days ], and then keep them around in that
form to re-commit as/when/if-ever the feature gets enabled so there is
no extra duplication of your effort.

How does that sound ?

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] A word about (missing) Specification Documents and (late) Feature Mails

2006-10-23 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Niklas,

On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 10:40 +0200, Niklas Nebel wrote:
 Michael Meeks wrote:
  Let me show you why I feel this way, from a simple example I was
  reading this morning: notice the consultation going on in this issue:
  
  http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=56202

 Had you quoted more, we'd see that the .. part lists some problems 
 with the patch that haven't been resolved.

Sure - and they are valuable feedback, much appreciated; and need
fixing - but ultimately is there any point if User Experience are the
gateway for all changes, and simply don't comment ?

 On the other hand, it shouldn't turn into I've got an unfinished 
 implementation of something I can't describe, and expect Sun to do all 
 the real work about it.

real work ? honestly - do you expect to get perfect 1st patches from
people inexperienced with the 'intricacies' of the calc code ?
Volunteers for example ( Muthu is an unpaid Indian chap ).
If so, I would suggest that is not a realistic expectation. As for not
being able to describe what is required, I refuse to accept that adding
a single missing key-binding for a single language requires any more
detailed description in order for you (or anyone else) to understand
it :-)

If by real work you mean that the paperwork and interaction involved
in getting a small change into OpenOffice.org *far* outweighs the actual
time generating the code - then I totally agree with you :-) Some people
see that as a feature, I see it as a debilitating bug.

On projects I'm interested in developing, if a patch arrives that needs
a couple of minor fixes, I would tend to point these out  fix them at
the same time [ it's often no more effort than locating them in the 1st
instance ], test  commit.

  I find it hard to communicate how intensely frustrating the Sun
  interaction is, but I just thought of an innovative way here, watch this
  space.
 
 You could save yourself a lot of frustration by following a common-sense 
 order of steps: *First* define what a desired feature is, *then* start 
 implementing. Really. Try it.

jokeStrange - we have a different process whereby we have no idea
what we want to achieve, we just type at random for some weeks, then
submit a patch ;- This whole knowing what you want to achieve thing
is a revolutionary concept indeed./joke

Regards,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] A word about (missing) Specification Documents and (late) Feature Mails

2006-10-19 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Frank,

On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 12:35 +0200, Frank Schönheit wrote:
 In this case, Uwe would have told you that various documentation would
 need to be updated, to keep the product consistent

So - my experience is that the more people involved in a decision - the
less likely any decision is to be taken: consider the difficulty of
choosing a restaurant with 3 people vs. 10 people. I don't like
Chinese, I can't walk far, I know this place ...

Do you observe that phenomena too ? [ every week ? ]

Currently from my perspective we ( as a project ) don't suffer from too
many things happening at all quickly; indeed glacial movement is racing
past us, wrt. getting changes up-stream. Of course things are nice and
cosy inside Sun I'm sure - where there is some central-planning and
people can be persecuted in person through some chain of command.

Consequently, at the moment, I'm by instinct -hyper- reluctant to
consult anyone about anything if it can at all, possibly be avoided by
some means. For me consultation means a black hole of months of
unresponsiveness, and the need to go around begging yet more people to
actually do something. Perhaps you can persuade me otherwise, that by
consulting more people we'll get a genuinely better result, and not
endless delays ?

Let me show you why I feel this way, from a simple example I was
reading this morning: notice the consultation going on in this issue:

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=56202

[snip]
--- Additional comments from nn Tue Apr 4 ... 2006 ---

Default keyboard shortcuts are administered by User Experience, so
I'm cc'ing MMP to allow him to comment.
..
[snip]

A (perhaps) reasonable request - I mean, we just want to add a
keybinding that doesn't exist, in 1 language, to be more compatible with
what people expect. It is now Oct 19th 2006 - and we're still waiting
for User Experience to comment. And - wait, let me see - who is to blame
here ? it is clearly going to be my fault for not throttling someone
earlier ? This of course, is one of the more recent issues, some are
rather older.

Otherwise, in principle - I'm well up for getting as many people
involved as possible; as long as they have the right attitude:

wow, thanks for your work, let me help you get it included

I know this is your attitude personally Frank, and I've enjoyed working
with you on several pieces of code; however all too often people's
attitude seems to be:

I'm so busy I can't be bothered to reply to your mail/issue
or  no - I'm too busy to handle this = I'll block it
or  yes it's fine, but some step in the process wasn't done in
 the correct order = reject

  (The fact that the current help is ... sub-optimal doesn't mean
 we're allowed to make it worse, by out-dating it knowingly.)

As I say, of the ~million or so users that have been exposed to the
outdated help in this area, none I know of have noticed or cared enough
to actually file a bug. That suggests to me that my decision (in this
case) to let the help get out of sync was not altogether a bad one -
what's your take on this data point ? are you certain that help should
be updated synchronously ? A converse data point is that lots of people
were happy with the new Quick-starter and congratulated me
personally ;-) [ though Raul wrote a bug chunk of it in fact ]

 Other people - from QA - might have expressed interest to get their
 fingers on the CWS before it's integrated, to add the new feature to
 their existing tests.

Sounds good to me; another problem is, finding out who these people are
and how to them involved ? of course, I love to work with domain experts
that are responsive and helpful, and I'm happy to help inform QA on what
they need to test things.

 Yet other people could have told you that there in fact is an existing
 specification for the quickstarter, which claims that's a Windows-only
 feature.

I wonder if anyone has ever read it after it was written - perhaps we
can tell that from the web server logs. I wonder if it is still
accurate ? [ or are you suggesting all screenshots and string lists
duplicated in any specification must be updated for any relevant string
change ? ].

  Now also this specification is out-of-date (which makes
 specifications effectively useless, on the long run).

As you know, I think *almost* all specifications, particularly for
something so mind-blowingly simple (conceptually) as the quick-starter
are broadly a total waste of time; or to abuse your words are
effectively useless anyway :-) I for one, don't want to be writing the
transparently obvious down at great length repeatedly. It seems Sun
people have a different view.

 As you can see, the idea of involving different people with different
 competences (that's the idea behind an iTeam) *early* is not an end in
 itself - it's about delivering a self-contained, consistent product 

Re: [dev] A word about (missing) Specification Documents and (late) Feature Mails

2006-10-17 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Uwe,

On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 13:50 +0200, Uwe Fischer wrote:
 Don't get me wrong - I love this feature and I will never say anything 
 negative about Michael Meeks, who surely is a programming genius. ;-)

Haha ;-) the sarcasm detector just exploded.

 How am I supposed to deliver a timely Help for this feature when
 - there is no Spec Doc

Is it necessary to write a full spec. for porting a feature to a new
platform ? I hope not. How about porting all of OO.o to 64bit ? ;-)

 - there is a feature mail very short before the new build that
 contains the feature

Sorry it was rather late, though it's not clear really what to expect
here.

 - there is no one to send questions or issues to?

As far as I can see, I didn't get killed yet :-) on the other hand,
you're guaranteed a more prompt response [ that is if you actually want
one ], by mailing me (or at least CC'ing me) rather than some list I
can't read all of. [ 4817 unread for this list alone ].

 I have many questions, for example
 - will the feature be visible on Linux too (I see it in m187 Sols/Gnome)

Yes - anywhere with gtk+ available.

 - will the feature replace existing quickstarters on Linux or be in 
 parallel?

That is a distribution / vendor choice - but if you read the 'code' of
the existing quick-starters, you will experience the answer :-)

 - the text string on Tools/Options/OOo/General is different from the 
 existing text string on former Windows versions. I have no idea if this 
 change also changes the existing text string for Windows versions to be 
 the same as now on Solaris.

Nope it does not - easy to see from the patch.

 - what about the start parameter -quickstart? Will that work now on 
 UNIX? Must I change the Help here too?

We don't use that flag, so - no clue - no change there AFAIR.

 - why is the Help/Guide check box in the feature mail not marked? We did 
 mention the (Windows-only) Quickstarter at numerous places, as did the 
 OOo community in their printed and online documentation. The fact that a 
 real developer never scans through Help or Guide pages does not mean 
 that a feature is never Help/Guide relevant.

;-) haha - I often use the help myself. On the other hand, we shipped a
version of OO.o with this feature, and the help out of sync. to many
tens of thousands (if not millions) of users in our builds - and so far
I see no bug reports, so ... how important is this truly ?

 - on Windows, installing a patch will first close the application 
 including the Quickstarter. Will it be the same on UNIX?

On Linux (for me) you'd upgrade a native package / apply an O/S patch.
On Unix this is somewhat less problematic than win32 wrt. file locking
etc.

 For me, and may be for a lot of other community members, it is important 
 to get information about new or changed or removed features *early*.
 
 Best practice would be if every Help relevant feature has the 
 helpcontent2 module added, so I (or the developer) can change the help 
 files and have them integrated the same time as the feature.

Hokay - this is great best practise to know, and I'm happy to do it,
but it's the first time I've seen it mentioned.

Where is it documented ? perhaps it is already, but I havn't seen it:

* what module to add the CWS
* list of contact people to poke about updating help 
  what their area of responsibility is so we get the right
  people.
* means of detecting when they are done / assuring response

Then of course we need to find the right place in the wiki to do that,
and - naturally tell people the process has changed [ NB. mailing
individuals is more helpful than posting to a list people don't read ].

Anyhow - I'm sorry if this caused you some grief; hopefully we can get
it right next time, and I hope you like the feature - it substantially
improves code cleanliness, and 2nd start performance.

All the best,

Michael.

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[dev] configmgr re-factor ...

2006-10-02 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi there,

I'm starting an 'interesting' step-wise re-factor of configmgr -
stripping out tons of complexity. It seems to be going well so far ;-)
[ removed the 'simpleheap' thing without too much difficulty ], but I'm
wondering:

Is it ok up-stream to strip out all these poorly performing
side-effects of the (unused) shared-memory architecture ? :-)

Also - is there a simple to use regression test suite for this code
that I can press a button and 5 secs later determined I didn't cause a
regression [ none of the changes are tricky enough to require that yet
but ... ;-].

Thanks,

Michael.

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[dev] configmgr patch more data ...

2006-09-15 Thread Michael Meeks

On Wed, 2006-09-13 at 12:22 +0200, Joerg Barfurth wrote:
 Looks good.

I fixed your issues; thanks for the feedback, I attach the improved
patch. I also expanded the cache to some more fields that are broadly
constant, and split it into 1 cache per re-usable field. It saves some
more memory.

I'm also looking at the Subtree set usage:

http://go-oo.org/~michael/sortedsizes.ods

My concern here is the 16bytes per RBTree node (used in the set), at
least allocation here shows up on the profile.

It seems that 90% of these sorted sets are 8 items or less, and thus (I
suspect) rather fast to search, well, at least indistinguishable from
the order of the Set. The RBTree overhead for these = 8 sets is ~250k
(malloc), overall 500k. I'm sure we can do better.

HTH,

Michael.

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diff -u -r -x 'unxlng*' configmgr/source/backend/binaryreadhandler.cxx configmgr/source/backend/binaryreadhandler.cxx
--- configmgr/source/backend/binaryreadhandler.cxx	2006-06-20 00:18:33.0 +0100
+++ configmgr/source/backend/binaryreadhandler.cxx	2006-09-14 14:56:37.0 +0100
@@ -78,6 +78,8 @@
 , m_aNodeFactory()
 , m_aComponentName(_aComponentName)
 		{
+			for (int i = 0; i  LastEntry; i++)
+m_nInsert[i] = 0;
 		}
 		// -
 		BinaryReadHandler::~BinaryReadHandler()
@@ -283,6 +285,21 @@
 			m_BinaryReader.read (_aString);
 		}
 
+		void BinaryReadHandler::readName(rtl::OUString _aString, NamePool ePool)
+			SAL_THROW( (io::IOException, uno::RuntimeException) )
+		{
+			m_BinaryReader.read (_aString);
+			const int nElems = (sizeof (m_aPreviousName[0])
+/ sizeof (m_aPreviousName[0][0]));
+			for (int i = 0; i  nElems; i++)
+			{
+if (m_aPreviousName[ePool][i] == _aString)
+	_aString = m_aPreviousName[ePool][i];
+			}
+			m_aPreviousName[ePool][m_nInsert[ePool]++] = _aString;
+			m_nInsert[ePool] %= nElems;
+		}
+
 		// -
 		void BinaryReadHandler::readAttributes(node::Attributes  _aAttributes)
 			SAL_THROW( (io::IOException, uno::RuntimeException) )
@@ -311,7 +344,7 @@
 			SAL_THROW( (io::IOException, uno::RuntimeException) )
 		{
 			readAttributes(_aAttributes);
-			readString(_aName);
+			readName(_aName, GroupName);
 		}
 		// -	
 		void BinaryReadHandler::readSet(rtl::OUString _aName, node::Attributes _aAttributes,
@@ -319,9 +352,9 @@
 			SAL_THROW( (io::IOException, uno::RuntimeException) )
 		{
 			readAttributes(_aAttributes);
-			readString(_aName);
-			readString(_sInstanceName);
-			readString(_sInstanceModule);	
+			readName(_aName, SetName);
+			readName(_sInstanceName, InstanceName);
+			readName(_sInstanceModule, InstanceModule);
 		}
 			
 		// -
@@ -421,7 +454,7 @@
 
 			ValueFlags::Type eBasicType = readValueFlags(bSeq, bHasValue, bHasDefault);
 			readAttributes(_aAttributes);
-			readString(_aName);
+			readName(_aName, ValueName);
 			
 			if (!bSeq  (bHasValue || bHasDefault))
 			{
diff -u -r -x 'unxlng*' configmgr/source/backend/binaryreadhandler.hxx configmgr/source/backend/binaryreadhandler.hxx
--- configmgr/source/backend/binaryreadhandler.hxx	2006-01-19 17:52:58.0 +
+++ configmgr/source/backend/binaryreadhandler.hxx	2006-09-14 14:55:49.0 +0100
@@ -95,6 +95,18 @@
 			BinaryReader m_BinaryReader;	
 ComponentDataFactory m_aNodeFactory;
 rtl::OUStringm_aComponentName;
+
+			// pool recent strings for re-use
+			enum NamePool {
+	GroupName,
+	SetName,
+	InstanceName,
+	InstanceModule,
+	ValueName,
+	LastEntry
+			};
+			int   m_nInsert[LastEntry];
+			rtl::OUString m_aPreviousName[LastEntry][8];
 		public:
 			BinaryReadHandler(rtl::OUString const  _aFileURL, rtl::OUString const  _aComponentName, MultiServiceFactory const  _aFactory);
 			~BinaryReadHandler();
@@ -154,8 +166,10 @@
 			void readValue(rtl::OUString _aName, node::Attributes _aAttributes,
 			  uno::Any _aValue, uno::Any _aDefaultValue,uno::Type _aType)
 			SAL_THROW( (io::IOException, uno::RuntimeException) );
-			
+
+			void readName(rtl::OUString _aString, NamePool ePool)
+SAL_THROW( (io::IOException, uno::RuntimeException) );
 		};
 	// ---
 	}
--- configmgr/source/data/types.cxx	2005-12-28 17:29:35.0 +
+++ configmgr/source/data/types.cxx	2006-09-09 13:02:04.0 +0100
@@ -60,26 +60,6 @@
 //-	
 using memory::Allocator;
 using memory::Accessor;

Re: [dev] ustring - global hash (?)

2006-09-02 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Kay,

On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 18:15 +0200, Kay Ramme wrote:
 would you mind to reiterate the potential / real savings and costs for 
 me? Admitting that I have not understand your explanations the first 
 time ... ;-)

Sure; simple enough. My analysis of duplicate strings (for a quiescent
writer) is here:

http://go-oo.org/~michael/ustrings.ods

It shows 90% of our OUStrings (by memory used) are duplicates of other
OUStrings - so we're burning 1Mb here pointlessly. I've been going
around fixing some of the specific worst-offenders here.

In many cases these are plain-and-simple ASCII constants used as cnames
to denote fields, property names etc. These are typically constructed
with the normal RTL_CONSTASCII_VERYLONGMACRONAME(foo) type
constructors, which generates a new copy every time, hence the
duplication.

The proposal is to use an always-growing, non-aged, hash of such common
strings; and a nice constructor something like:

rtl::OUString rtl::OUString::fromCName(const char *foo)

[ or whatever ], that will avoid the need for ugly macros (we have to
iterate to hash the string anyway), and will return the same value as
last time.

Performance wise this should ~always be a win: of course we need to do
1 hash lookup, (with a lock taken I guess), but the current situation of
expensive memory allocation, copying etc. is no doubt rather slower.
And, of course - we can save again when doing comparisons 1st by pointer
value.

We'd need a simple hash table impl. in sal/ though that'd be fairly
easy to hack up [ it'd be hard to produce something worse than stl's
effort ;-]. What do you think ?

Regards,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] ustring - global hash (?)

2006-08-29 Thread Michael Meeks

On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 16:55 +0200, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
 Yes, some (singleton) functionality
 
rtl::OUString intern(rtl::OUString const  arg)

of course - for programmatic operations:

rtl::OUString intern(const char *str);

would prolly be a valuable variant; and since we'd need to hash that
string anyway, we could dispense with some ugly macro evil to calculate
the length, making some code potentially sweeter.

t'would be nice, you make me almost want to implement a simple hash
table in sal/ now :-) [ which I could re-use to make the string
debugging more portable  up-stream-able ].

Regards,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Re: performance: framework memory ...

2006-08-28 Thread Michael Meeks

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 09:21 +0200, Carsten Driesner - Sun Germany -
ham02 - Hamburg - Software Engineer wrote:
 2. Use class members for the strings and don't create them in different 
 methods. Currently this is the solution I use for my newer classes as it 
 decreases duplicates significantly

I've attached a patch that does this for some of the worst offenders
at:

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=68984

Shouldn't be too controversial I hope :-)

Thanks,

Michael.

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[dev] performance: filter memory use ...

2006-08-24 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi there,

So - following on from my analysis of string duplication at:

http://go-oo.org/~michael/ustrings.ods

Having blamed a chunk of this on configmgr - it turns out that some of
the space I thought was there, is actually in the filter code - where we
construct strings from ASCII a lot.

Anyhow - since some nice macros had been used I could re-work this
fairly easily:

before:
41076K writable-private, 73560K readonly-private, and 14608K shared
41080K writable-private, 73560K readonly-private, and 14608K shared
41084K writable-private, 73560K readonly-private, and 14608K shared
after:
40936K writable-private, 73552K readonly-private, and 14608K shared
40812K writable-private, 73548K readonly-private, and 14608K shared
40924K writable-private, 73552K readonly-private, and 14608K shared

~ saving of ~150k or so (collecting a few of these up is worthwhile).
The code should also be faster :-)

Simple patch filed at:

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=68929

ustring counts before/after:

107 ClipboardFormat
107 DetectService
107 Preferred
107 URLPattern
108 Extensions
108 MediaType
108 PreferredFilter
164 FileFormatVersion
165 FilterService
165 TemplateName
165 UIComponent
166 Flags
167 DocumentService
173 Filter
180 UserData
210 en-US
271 UINames
275 cfg:string
285 ItemDescriptorContainer
301 Name
351 Label
355 HelpURL
372 CommandURL
548 UIName
615 x-default
704 Type
   1094 LabelType

after:

 60 IsVisible
 63 com.sun.star.drawing.DrawingDocument
 63 Regular
 64 Bold
 69 Factory
 71 Style
 72 $1
 72 $2
 72 $3
 72 com.sun.star.uno.XInterface
 78 void
 88 com.sun.star.i18n.Transliteration.l10n
 95 com.sun.star.text.TextDocument
173 Filter
210 en-US
275 cfg:string
278 UIName
285 ItemDescriptorContainer
351 Label
355 HelpURL
372 CommandURL
541 Type
615 x-default
   1094 LabelType

HTH,

Michael.

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[dev] performance: framework memory ...

2006-08-24 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi there,

So - I'm investigating the large number of duplicate / allocated
strings that float around the place. It seems like the framework is an
offender here:

incidence Name   size   wasted
~350  Type 16   5584
548   UIName   20  10940
368   CommandURL   28  10276
351   HelpURL  22   7700
347   Label18   6228
281   ItemDescriptorContainer  54  15120
Total 55,848

Of course, the overhead of so many small allocations is quite high too
I think, so it'd be good to fix this, and I guess it's prolly quite
easy, I imagine the sequence population in:

void SAL_CALL OReadMenuBarHandler::startElement:
Sequence PropertyValue  aSubMenuProp( 5 );
aSubMenuProp[0].Name = rtl::OUString( 
RTL_CONSTASCII_USTRINGPARAM( ITEM_DESCRIPTOR_COMMANDURL ));
aSubMenuProp[1].Name = rtl::OUString( 
RTL_CONSTASCII_USTRINGPARAM( ITEM_DESCRIPTOR_HELPURL ));
..

and similar code cut/pasted in:

void SAL_CALL OReadMenuPopupHandler::startElement(
void SAL_CALL OReadToolBoxDocumentHandler::startElement( - 3 incidences

explain the problem.

Of course, simple to fix - the question is, how do you want me to do
this ? in this 31337, threaded world where we don't want global inits;
it's not clear to me what the right solution is.

Is there a well-defined init time for this code ? [ some service
activation or something ] that we can hook to create some global
members ? or is there a better way ?

Thanks,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Re-opening a milestone that has been announced as ready for CWS usage?

2006-08-11 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Jorg,

On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 10:46 +0200, Jörg Jahnke wrote:
 What would be consequences of always fixing bugs in the next available 
 milestone?

 - Clear rules. What has been announced as finished is finished, no one 
 will touch it again. Neither inside nor outside SUN.

I'm well up for this :-) as you know the concept of moving static tags
in CVS is acutely painful for us. [ Particularly now we want to have a
single source archive that has CVS repo. data and also .svn repo data -
(for which it's critically important that it's in-sync ;-) ].

So - it seems to me the fix is simple: we're not running out of
milestone numbers anytime soon ;-) '181'  2^31, so surely just
getting a very, very quick new milestone out with the fix is the right
approach ?

Anyhow - it seems you're thinking on these lines anyway; so - just
cheering you on :-)

Thanks,

Michael.

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[dev] hello

2006-02-03 Thread michael . meeks
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quarantined by FortiClient.


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[dev] Re: [discuss] Re: [dev] Re: [discuss] Incubator for vba macros

2005-12-13 Thread Michael Meeks
Hi Jurgen,

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 09:24 +0100, Jürgen Schmidt wrote:
 I am flexible when we think we need it i am willing to support it. But 
 of course the VBA API is not better than our existing API (far from it), 

Of course - there is no argument as to which API is 'better' per-se;
personally I only learned the StarBasic API by reading the
http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/various_topics/VbaStarBasicXref.pdf
Vba to Starbasic cross-reference guide (which was much appreciated
incidentally).

 it has only the advantage that it is well known, has great IDE support 
 (MS Dev Studio), is well documented (thousands of books) and many many 
 people use it.

You forgot the macro recorder; most of the VBA macros we analyse show
serious signs of being macro record/cut/paste/adapt; almost no flow
control, nothing complex in them :-). But sure - no-one is proposing
that people start writing new macros using the VBA object model vs.
OO.o.

 I personally believe that we will never reach a 100% roundtrip with 
 macros and i would concentrate on the existing API and improvements in 
 this area. Some of our existing APIs should be redesigned or improved by 
 using the UNO ease of use features and a lot of other things can be done 
 to simplify the development of our existing API.

Of course that is valuable work - but outside the remit of the proposed
incubator - which is really an interoperability project: yes, almost
certainly we will never reach 100% compatibility - lets face it that
would implicitely involve 100% feature parity with MS Office since ~all
features are exposed to VBA - which seems unlikely. However - I'm
certain that we can provide something extremely useful to lots of
people, that will help them migrate to OO.o.

 so no vote from my side, no +1 and no -1, only the offering to support 
 the project on the level of the existing API.

Well - it's encouraging that you're not opposed :-) thanks for your
input  insight - much appreciated,

Regards,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] openoffice.org wiki

2005-10-26 Thread michael meeks
On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 10:44 +0200, Martin Hollmichel wrote:
 we talked some time ago about having one wiki for developers available. 
 We currently have two:

Sure - also; I believe Intel has a chunk of (currently) internal OO.o
documentation in MediaWiki format that it'd be good to merge in as well.

 1. move to an mediawiki installation, do we all agree ?

Of course - there is a lot to say from every side here  a potentially
vast  inconclusive flamewar; having used both - I'm pleased with
MediaWiki, and rather annoyed at the huge slew of mess that Twiki seems
to create by default [ broken  unpleasant per-user pages, inclusion of
lots of docs in-system etc. ]. Plus the editing interface  markup style
seems to suck harder in Twiki - but, most likely I'm just biased.

 2. look for an administrator of this installation

Mike Leibowitz is (kindly) administering go-oo.org's currently, but
neither of us are really concerned about holding onto that I guess -
whatever is easiest / most-helpful for you is best I think.

Of course - wrt. content admin - I'd hope we can have little ~no
official editorial oversight - beyond focusing it on developer content 
just let it evolve.

 3. how to migrate the existent data of the current wiki to the new 
 instance ?

Migrating the existing content is ~easy enough; and I can volenteer
some typing action there; I'd suggest simple cut/paste of the existing
developer content with some (manual?) re-formatting.

Also - there are some things (suck as the Twiki user-name mapping page)
where we could benefit from simply importing the existing
http://go-oo.org/name-account.html page instead of persisting with that.

Anyhow - IMHO the goal of a single wiki page is an encouraging step
towards working more closely together which would be great.

HTH,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] OOo 2.0b2 Linux Distribution

2005-09-07 Thread michael meeks
Hi Rob

On Sun, 2005-09-04 at 08:31 -0700, Rob Ogilvie wrote:
 There are a bajillion distributions out there.

And most of them have ~negligable market share, and a great chunk of
them are self-built things anyway = build it yourself ;-)

I guess if you are 31337 enough to be a slackware user you shouldn't
have any trouble stripping the headers off the RPMs  unpacking the
archive payloads. There is little magic to the packaging in terms of
triggers / post/pre install scripts - so that should work for you.

   If you plan on primarily distributing OOo in binary format, you
 can't decide to package it in a distribution-specific package
 management system.

Nah - as Joerg said - check the LSB, if your distro is not compliant
wrt. RPM installation - flame them instead; cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base

Finally - if you really, really, really want binary packages for your
own system - it should be rather trivial to generate them - hack at
solenv/bin/make_installer.pl - there are already hooks (used by most
'real' packagers) to do what is (essentially) a simple file install -
you could easily tar the results of that  up-load to the site of your
choice.

Foo ! ;-)

Michael.

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Re: [dev] How to download the Old OO sources?

2005-07-29 Thread michael meeks

On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 18:17 +0200, Eike Rathke wrote:
  Can anybody tell me how to download the old OO Sources,such as 
  OOo_SRC680_m100_source.tar.gz?
  As you know,downloading them through CVS is too slow.Thks a lot!

We have some (old) packages on:

http://go-ooo.org/packages/SRC680/

they are split into -core, -system, -binfilter (and latterly) -lang to
shrink them  improve download time. If you build using ooo-build for
development, by default you only need -core on a relatively recent Linux
system.

HTH,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] link desktop - soffice.bin

2005-06-10 Thread michael meeks
Hi Joesny,

On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 10:28 -0300, Joesny Fagner de Oliveira wrote:
 I am working under openoffice.org revision SRC680_m104s1, and was doing 
 some tests with desktop module. But i can't test my modification 
 directily, unless if i generete RPMs again... i don't know how could i 
 link files:

So - linkoo avoids 'soffice.bin'; you just want to copy
unxlngi6.pro/bin/soffice to soffice.bin in your installset on re-build.
I believe if you symlink it then it may run, but gdb will get horribly
confused when you try to debug it [ at last attempt that is ;-].

HTH,

Michael.

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Re: [dev] Future of source - OOo

2005-05-11 Thread michael meeks

On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 07:57 -0400, Daniel Carrera wrote:
 I think it makes more sense for someone (you?) to make a Mono-UNO bridge 
 so people can write extensions in C#.

A good chunk of that work is already done  lurking in ooo-build
getting finished slowly.

Hmm,

Michael.

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