G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-09-03 at 19:31 +0100, Enrique Castro wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I am trying to learn new features in OOo2.0.
>> Exploring the Mail Merge wizard I have seen the option to send mail by
>> e-mail, not just compose documents ("Letters").
>>
>> This option is deactivated (grayed out). A handy help text indicates that
>> in order to work this feature, the JavaMail extension must be installed.
>> How can this feature be activated?
>>
> Since you like experimenting with pre-releases, please see
> http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=51638 for a possible
> solution.
>
Hi GRS,
what is supposed to serve a beta release for?, if not experimenting.
Please, don't tell me that I risk to get features not working properly yet.
I know. The beta is tha place to test and report bugs. If I wait for the
final:
a) The final will contain a lot more bugs
b) Fixig those bugs will be delayed till next major release
Last April I supported quite hard comments after proposing quite small
changes to the _wording_ of the file-association dialog in the Windows
installer. I was told that it was "too late", "feature-freeze" having
ocurred months before. Now I see that as late as July the e-mail mail merge
was under development. This is quite surprising since the issue was two
years old, and there is a comment that read:
*** This issue has been confirmed by popular vote. ***
(Sat Feb 8 04:46:42 -0700 2003)
After reading this I understand why other issues are open by ages and why
none of the bugs I have reported myself is fixed (for instance, see
#44428).
Please, do not read this as a complaining. I am very hppy of OOo 2.0 being
here as it is, and understand the heavy workload that it have taken to
accomplish this milestone. But I do have doubts about the priorities in the
bugfixing strategies. The QA team seem to do a good work, but afterwards I
perceive a too programmatic-centric (and even java-centric) approach to
select issues to fix. It's only a feeling, I am not blaming anyone. Let me
explain myself a little more.
Reading release notes for each build and browsing issuezilla I get the
feeling that a lot of work go into inside components, issues only seen by
programmers and that programmers my feel as a challenge: tasks appealing to
a programmer by their programatic interest/difficulty. But at the same time
bugs that are important for the end user, GUI functionality most times, go
slowly into a very long queue and sleep for ages.
I understand that the obscure "inside" work of bugfixing is absolutely
essential to ensure the high quality of OOo. However, I would suggest that,
from a PR perspective, some more dedication to end-user visible issues
would pay big revenues into the project, in form of more community support
and sense of "pertenence and complicity". I do see some disagreement now
between what I would call "the core programmers team" and community users
or "opinion makers". The smoke can be seen in the Java issue or the
"Sun-Microsoft" fears. BTW, a good case could be constructed from the
history of this "e-mail mail-merge" issue. But let it die.
Finishing, we must congratulate ourselves for having a beast like OOo2.0
working, and with advanced features like e-mail-merge. Even more if this
feature is implemented with Python; this indicate that the above fears are
only minor concers to be aware of, but that OOo development is healthy and
moving forward.
Enrique
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