Hi Patricia; One disclaimer that I should make is that I am not actually an experienced OpenOffice developer. I only joined the project when it moved to the ASF and there were so many things to do that I basically managed to do a lot of stuff without having to learn the internals too much.
Your assessment is mostly correct. We do have problems bringing newcomers to the project and as long as we don’t do a better effort to bringing and mentoring new developers the project will struggle to provide real development. The idea of having teams to work on OpenOffice is not new: it was the way things worked under SUN and while it pretty much worked, it depended on having a corporate sponsor. Of course some people just have to complain about corporate sponsors … and the model broke due to many reasons that don’t really matter too much anymore. Nowadays the AOO experts are really busy on their jobs, which is understandable, and some of us that are not really experts on the code think that the code is ugly enough that we should be consider re-writing it. IMHO, We don’t really have resources to adopt the team approach, even at small scale. We would do better to focus on a small set of issues that are affecting future development. Another thing to consider is that we still have quite a bunch of code from older Oracle branches and Symphony that remains to be merged. Working on those requires less mentorship but still some important expertise. Now that I remember there are some pending projects that could get someone intermediate get started: - Updating the hsqldb to the newer version: we have code in a mercurial branch for that. This is java BTW :). - Update ICU, some code for this is in symphony and would have to be digged up. - Bring the latest VBA code from Symphony. - We had a GSoC 2013 project to bring CMIS (this is also Java). (Again .. no time to mentor, sorry) Hope that helps, Pedro. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
