Hi Martin, On 2011-03-31 at 12:22 +0200, Martin Srebotnjak wrote:
> I was flabbergasted by the forced-unto-us not-so-functional online > help system, as you might have read several times on this list. I am sorry that you feel personally offended by that; the online help is not perfect - but for those who feel that as a stopper, there is always the possibility to install the offline version. And patches are greatly appreciated! I have no intention to let it be bad; it is an easy code, some 1300 lines of Python: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/help/tree/helpcontent2/to-wiki/wikiconv2.py > This is something that mostly targets the non-English speaking > communities (at least on Linux and OS X) - and we were not asked how > the end product should look like. Since it was implemented there were > no major enhancements and the non-functionality of that online help is > still obvious to all. http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Wikihelp was created after I did the wrong step that I developed the initial version without consulting you. I thought that this version was agreed on the l10n mailing list - was it not? > Now the thing will go further: > http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~kendy/blog/archives/monthly/2011-03.html#2011-03-31T11_35_21.htm > What are the OFFICIAL specs, confirmed by the LibreOffice community > for further development of the online help? I am extremely sorry if I misunderstood that the above mentioned spec was generally embraced; but let me assure you once again that I won't do any more work for you. You may have noticed that I become a translator in the meantime too (http://translations.documentfoundation.org/cs/), so now I have much better understanding when you talk about the translator needs. > What is "our approach", who is "us"? In this context, it was those who contributed to the development of the conversion tool. > Does it include us, the L10N community, translating and updating the > help, or who? Did the L10N teams leads give their perspective on this > issue? It is in line with the spec, so in fact yes, I thought that it was discussed, and agreed. > The online help system developer has also revamped the search toolbar > "to behave more like in [...] Firefox": > http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~kendy/blog/archives/monthly/2011-03.html#2011-03-29T09_43_06.htm > and he is now also mentoring students cleaning the UI. While some > tasks in > http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Gsoc/Ideas#UI_cleanup > look like real cleanup, some might really be re-designs. > > I am wondering if LO is (unlike OOo) going in the direction that every > developer can change the UI without consent from the community. (That > could lead to LO developers thinking loud on their blogs like this: > "Playing with the LO code yesterday I decided that LO will now drop > the Base component, because I don't like it, it just takes place on > disk, it should be an extension.") Or maybe there are some individuals > (or employees of some companies) with greater rights and privileges > than others in the LO community? Well - should we vote on each and every feature that would go into LibreOffice? That would bore people to death after a while ;-) If you look at the development mailing list, each and every patch that does more good than bad is committed; and everything can be again reverted, or subsequently fixed, no problem there. > Should not the UI changes be discussed in length? With some usability > studies etc.? If there is somebody who comes up with a beautiful design and convinces enough people to implement it, that's perfect! But do you remember the amount of controversy that Renaissance project brought? And where did it end up? Lots of discussions, and no result. So my conclusion is "never let perfect be enemy of the good" ;-) There are so many obviously incorrect things in the UI, that you just cannot make things worse when you fix that. And if you do, there is a plenty of other developers who will just fix your error. Or users make me revert that. Whatever :-) - that's the beauty of freedom. > Will the disappointment with the decision-making process lead to > further forks of LibreOffice or to the return of translation teams > back to the OOo project? Again - I promise to do everything to save you work. When the help switches to something that would need change of your workflow, the l10n people will be the first to be involved. But the GSoC task does not involve any change for you, it is only about the technical part, and that is converting the wikihelp to native help systems. > I am writing here, because I think this is not a single-developer > decision nor just a GUI/developer-people-thing, and because I would > like to know the official specs for the Help and GUI redesign/cleanup > as well as the opinion of the L10N teams, because international help > system is very much in the hands of the L10N teams. > > I do like Kendy and his commitment to this project, I do know that he > means well and is spending a lot of time working on the development of > LibreOffice. But some things just need major consensus of all the > people deeply involved. Maybe there should be a sandbox for that kind > of enhancements and people should then vote if they like the feature > enough so it would be further developed and included into vanilla LO. Well, honestly, I am not interested in a setup where I work on something for 3 months, that would be just thrown away by a poll ;-) - similarly as you do not want to see your work being erased. I do hope what helps more is the introduction of the development snapshots: http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ There you can test the changes early, and get the developers to improve them, or revert, or whatever. Unfortunately no Windows builds yet - but only due to master still not being buildable on Windows; and only one of the machines builds with translations (MacOSX). We (OK - Norbert, Thorsten, Robert, me) are working on both - that way you'll be able to test your improvements in translations the next day after you change something, without you having to build your own build. Hope this helps, Kendy -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to l10n+h...@libreoffice.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/l10n/ *All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted*
