On Sun, 2005-09-04 at 11:10 +0100, Enrique Castro wrote:
> 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
>
He, he. Testing beta candidates is definitely something that is needed.
Did I say otherwise. NO. I made a suggestion that you seem to have taken
out of context.
> 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).
Has nothing to do with the suggestion I put forward. If you want to rant
please leave me out of it.
>
> 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.
>
I have read it as a complaint, one to which I have no defense as I am
not a developer but only a writer who wants OOo to succeed. That is why
I collected the mail merge issue.
> 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.
Perhaps you should direct your question/rant to [email protected]
Chances are you will get a better picture of the development cycle
there. The QA lists are another source of information and the project
certainly can use people to evaluate issues.
>
> 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.
>
--
PLEASE KEEP MESSAGES ON THE LIST.
OpenOffice.org Documentation Co-Lead
http://documentation.openoffice.org/
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