On 27/03/2014 Jürgen Schmidt wrote:
On 3/27/14 1:59 AM, Andrea Pescetti wrote:
Is there interest for a "live" (meaning: IRC + video, like Google
Hangouts or similar) meeting to make sure that we (developers, QA,
Localization, Documentation, website...) are all on the same page
regarding the upcoming 4.1 release?
we can try such a meeting but I don't see the benefit compared to a
clear communication on the mailing list (can be of course improved).
The benefit would be: make sure that active volunteers have a chance to
be heard and to influence the release. We are doing good now; still, we
can do better. See below for concrete examples.
Either we do it in a more organized way and define exactly what we
expect or I am not interested.
I am not interested in the other option. Well, maybe I misunderstood
what you mean by "organized", but for sure I would find it overkill that
we have to vote for someone to be in a call to represent a certain group
(say, QA) and vote on what the call topics should be. It's an informal
meeting.
It wouldn't be a meeting where things are decided (we have the lists for
that!), but merely a meeting where people can inform each other to make
sure that all priorities are being addressed ...
I am in favor of having such discussion mainly on the list to have it
documented.
Note that it's more about being informed (about stuff that is already
somewhere on the lists), and discussion can follow on lists.
Maybe it helps if I make a concrete past example: the "Restore windows"
problem https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=119006 has been
known for two years. It only triggered on certain versions of Mac OS X
and only after a crash. Still it caused 500+ e-mails, and probably
countless forum posts and some enraged/lost users. In retrospect, we
should have evaluated it better.
How can we avoid the next "Restore windows", i.e., something that is
known, important to someone, already documented somewhere but that would
deserve better attention? It's important for OpenOffice as a project
that active volunteers feel that they can influence the release. And it
is also very good for OpenOffice as a product.
Now, the obvious answer is "Just place it in Bugzilla and nominate it as
a release blocker". This doesn't always work. For a release blocker, for
example, you would require in most cases that a patch is available, and
a description that is purely technical can miss to state why it is
important to get it fixed before release. And if you look at who is
nominating blockers, you'll see that only a few people do that.
The IRC+video meeting is the best solution I can find, but anything else
that guarantees proper escalation would work for me. Just, asking people
to simply follow the process is too demanding on volunteers and we need
to streamline it (another concrete example? we don't have 4.0 in Danish
mainly due to bad communication, since translation was completed before
the 4.0 release but after the deadlines).
If you want yet another example... we already know that OpenOffice 4.1
is going to have display problems for Gnome 3 users on Linux. Two bugs
have clearly been identified: no refresh on fields
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=124482 and no scrollbars
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121627 ; the former has a
working patch by Andre and I'll nominate it as a blocker, but what about
the latter? Does it make sense to nominate it even if we don't have a
fix available? Will a meeting where active people can report on what
they see on the forums, lists etc help in making the assessment?
Regards,
Andrea.
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