Hi Caolan, Please let me start by thanking you for your past service on the SC, and your important contributions to TDF and the LibreOffice project.
I would like to ask whether you would be willing to make a commitment for a term of office on the BoD. I am certain that you will assure us that you support openness of the source code of LibreOffice. But I would like to put it to you that no software source code is truly open until it has been rendered as understandable as possible to as many people as possible. This is not yet the case with the source code of LibreOffice. There is no global design documentation available to someone who would like to learn to hack it. The devs have made some progress towards documenting the code base, but only at a more-microscopic level (the API documentation at http://docs.libreoffice.org, for example). But, IMHO, it would be extremely valuable to have more-global documentation outlining the architecture and working of the code base and its various components and modules. The solution of interested individuals gleaning knowledge by lurking and asking questions on IRC is not an effective and community-oriented method of sharing knowledge. Would you be willing to commit yourself to actively work with me on developing global design documentation that will be a major asset to any party wanting to start hacking the core and developing extensions? I am thinking of something along the lines of: - a global description of the architecture of LibreOffice; - a global description of the architecture of the LibreOffice programs, Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base; - a listing of all the libraries and components used in the software, and an explanation of why they are used and what they do; - a description of the differences between the versions of LibreOffice for *nix, Mac and Windows; - whatever other material that your expertise as a core dev tells you is useful and needed for genuinely opening up the source code to the world in the broadest possible sense. This could usefully be a collaborative initiative actively worked on by Caolan McNamara, Thorsten Behrens and Michael Meeks. Please may I ask your thoughts about this idea and whether you would explicitly agree to be part of it? In any case, wishing you all the best and, again, thanking you for your past work for us. :-) -- David Nelson -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to steering-discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/steering-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
