Hi Frank,
Thanks for the fair explanation. Very reasonable and understandable as
well, as far as I am concerned.
Some comments inside:
Frank Schönheit wrote:
Hi Andrew,
What is the best way for someone to have some input to the future
direction of the product. I know one can enter RFEs
via the issue traker. But this tends to be much to granular with the
limitation of one issue per entry. I am thinking more of
a discussion about an overall approach. Using just this type of tool I
am afraid will too easily allow one to miss the forsest
for the trees.
Good question. And difficult to answer, unfortunately.
Approaching it from the one side:
I, as owner of the DBA project, have an opinion into which direction
[...]
Unfortunately, I am not free in scheduling all my and my team's time as
[...]
Approaching it from the other side:
The OpenOffice.org community can/should develop ideas and visions on the
[...]
For OOo 2.0, there had been a "Product Concept Document" explaining what
[...]
describes what was going to happen on the product's feature side [2].
The way I see serveral people react on what happens, make me think that
many:
- are not enough aware of (the complexity of the product/) this process;
and/or
- have to high expectations of their individual influence; and/or
- cannot understand why their 'easy to implement bugfix (etc)' cannot be
integrated.
If somehow this could be explained better, that would do quite some
good. IMHO.
Effectively, this means: There's no dedicated "Let's discuss the future
of OOo" forum. But there are a lot of channels (mailing lists and, yes,
IZ) by which people can communicate their wishes. Somebody needs to
distill those thousands of wishes into a vision/plan/concept for OOo 2.x.
I fear this distillation process is less transparent than it should be
(see [3] for all information I'm aware of), but it's happening. And it's
also taking into account user feedback, since both IZ (and IZ votes) and
mailing lists are read by the relevant people, or at least by people who
are approached by the relevant people for their opinion ...
This is about RFE's.
What about bug-fixes? Can something be told on the process that
seperates bugs that are going to be fixed and those that are not?
Well, forums, honestly ... Personally, I don't like forums too much
(they're usually much less convenient that news groups, or, if it must
be, mailing lists), so I'm not a frequent visitor. Also given that there
is no "THE OpenOffice.org forum", I suppose it might be that more of the
people mentioned above are missing the forums, and everything going on
there.
Maybe a good opportunity for the community, to make sure that one or two
on each forum/list pass the highlights further to 'the channal'.
A final remark.
Remembering some discussions on [EMAIL PROTECTED] and private with some
very dedicated people, I'm sometimes a little concerned about the effect
of the "grand, rough" process on active community-members.
I haven't yet taken time to dig in other mailing lists' archives and so
on, to see where this all has been or should be discussed (eventually
the community council, I gues).
But this thread is important for me, and might turn out to be a valueble
part in the process :-)
Kind regards,
Cor
Ciao
Frank
[1] in case you're asking: "Application Development with Base". This
implies the need for some competitive features, and some large
amount of work in the Programmability area.
[2] I'm serious about this "feature side". There's a lot of highly
valueable contribution from non-Sun people to OpenOffice.org, and
OOo would be dramatically poorer without it. But in terms of actual
features the user can see and use in the final product, Sun still
plays the major role.
[3]http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/handling_RFEs.html
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Cor Nouws
www.nouenoff.nl - www.bsooo.nl - http://nl.openoffice.org
Open. For business.
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