Hi Thorsten,
indeed, as you say so far discussion among the projects has been solved
informally (actually my mail to Italo was rather informal as well). I
think the members of the TC and the people that attend the plugfests do
already carry that liaison role, but (like yourself) they are very busy
people. And I would much rather have these people spend their time on
writing specifications if the issues are already specified but just have
implementation issues. That is not to say that I want you or anybody
else to stop doing what comes informally and naturally (certainly not),
but to have a tenacious bulldog appointed within these projects that
makes sure that progress is made even if people are swamped.
From where I stand (and I'm not part of any specific project) there are
a number of interoperability issues at your end still open I think,
although probably people within TDF are already working on these.
Notably this includes the use of (legacy) SVM wrappers instead of native
alternative ODF frames and the lack of support for frame alternatives
and clarification of the range selection of clipboard content (the issue
that was raised by Gnumeric in August, as you may recall). Also probably
some other forward looking capabilities which provide answers to common
interoperability issues - like RDF and SVG support, as well as font
inclusion - deserve some attention as well. Even though ODF as a
document format has plenty of traction, some specific parts such as
ODF's 3D objects stand less of a chance to make it as the dominant
standard in this area (given that there are far better and more widely
used standards for 3D). In order to make the experience better for
everyone and make at least the content portable/visible to other (less
complete) implementations I think that should be made more robust by
making sure there are standards based fallbacks (in SVG, PNG) for any
such parts. Those are the kinds of things I would envision the liaisons
to discuss.
For people outside the project it is often not transparent who is
responsible for what in other projects. Rather than asking people to
just file a bug report, it would be good to have a named person in the
project that is 'responsible' for this and that has regular contact.
That is why I proposed to name a liaison - so there is an acknowledged
channel to discuss practical areas of improvement. But of course it is
just a suggestion.
Best,
Michiel
On 11/07/11 09:57, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
Michiel Leenaars:
Would it be an idea to have a liaison between the Document Foundation
and other projects such as Calligra, AbiWord/Gnumeric, with a named
standards compliance person (and a fallback) within each project, which
take care of monitoring and pushing fixes - given that breaking the
standard is a severe thing that noone wants, and fixing such things is
best done from the inside.
Hi Michiel,
hm - I wonder why we'd need this extra ceremony. From what I can
tell, the problem is not acknowledging the problem, but actually
fixing it.
I've personally addressed a bunch of interop things myself, if and
when my time permitted it (and usually made fixing those a priority
over other equally important tasks). If beyond that there are urgent
issues in LibO that you, or the other ODF-processing FLOSS projects
deem important, I think the most promising avenue to success is to
motivate hackers to come fix those.
Or is there a recent example where not having such a role was
causing much trouble?
Of course, talking with you, Jos, Ben others from those projects
on how to improve ODF interop should happen nevertheless - but does
take place, works nice well, often informally. :)
Cheers,
-- Thorsten
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