Re: Buildbots update

[Andrea Pescetti]

Damjan Jovanovic wrote:

I've asked infra to get LWP::Protocol::https installed on all the
buildbots and they're working on it.


Thanks for debugging, this will hopefully solve it. So indeed the issue 
is on the buildbots side but it was related to SourceForge now enforcing 
HTTPS downloads. I hope Infra will fix it soon. By the way, this is 
tracked in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-11296 for reference.



We also need to update our build instructions to install it when building.


Done for Fedora here:

https://wiki.openoffice.org/w/index.php?title=Fedora_Build_Instructions&diff=237350&oldid=230515

If someone can look up at package names for Ubuntu (and at whatever is 
needed for Windows), we can update 
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Building_Guide_AOO/Step_by_step 
too.


Regards,
  Andrea.

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RE: [QUESTION] Karma for www.openoffice.org contribution and editing

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

Thank you, Kay and Keith. That is what I vaguely sensed.  The explicit 
information is great.

 - Dennis

> -Original Message-
> From: Keith N. McKenna [mailto:keith.mcke...@comcast.net]
> Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 12:34
> To: dev@openoffice.apache.org
> Subject: Re: [QUESTION] Karma for www.openoffice.org contribution and
> editing
> 
> Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
> > We have arrangements for non-committers to contribute to the CWiki
> > and the MediaWiki, even the project Blog.
> >
> > In terms of requesting Help Wanted on topics related to
> > www.openoffice.org, is there a similar prospect or must all
> > contribution to the web site be by committers?
> >
> > I have always used the SVN, so I understand what that requires.  Is
> > there another avenue that does not require so much karma, but might
> > require approval and kick-off by a committer?
> >
> > (This came to mind because the first Help Wanted item that occurred
> > to me was for getting the Help Wanted script up on our How to
> > Contribute page and perhaps some other places.)
> >
> > -- Dennis E. Hamilton orc...@apache.org dennis.hamil...@acm.org
> > +1-206-779-9430 https://keybase.io/orcmid  PGP F96E 89FF D456 628A
> > X.509 certs used and requested for signed e-mail
> >
> 
> Dennis;
> 
> There is a process to use the CMS in Anonymous mode that allows
> non-committers to make changes to the web site that then have to be
> reviewed and approved by a committer. Rob Weir did a nice video tutorial
> for it on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fvg1pfHLhE
> 
> Regards
> Keith



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Apache OpenOffice Report from the Approved 2016-01-20 ASF Board Meeting Minutes

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

[BCC to PMC]

For your convenience, the Apache OpenOffice portion of the Approved 2016-01-20 
ASF Board minutes is available at

.


 - Dennis

BACKGROUND

The complete collection of Board Meeting Minutes can be found via web page 
.

Reports on the Apache OpenOffice project are provided quarterly to the Apache 
Software Foundation Board.  The AOO reporting quarters are Q1: January-March, 
Q2: April-June, Q3: July-September, and Q4: October-December.  

Report submission is the accountability of the AOO Project Management Committee 
Chair as the Apache Vice President for OpenOffice.  The current chair does not 
provide public versions of those reports until 

The 2015Q4 report was submitted to the 2016-01-20 Meeting of the ASF Board and 
approved as part of the minutes of that meeting at the 2016-02-17 Board 
Meeting. 






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Some thoughts on the learning curve

[Patricia Shanahan]

One of the biggest problems facing AOO is getting new developers up to 
speed.


As I understand it, there is a small group of developers who do 
understand AOO, but do not have anywhere near enough time to do 
everything that needs doing. Meanwhile, you have newcomers with various 
levels of experience who would like to help, but don't know where to start.


Even for someone like me who has previously worked on large programs, up 
to and including operating systems, AOO is a formidable body of code. I 
have started trying to study the profile system, since it seems to be a 
problem area, but even that narrow focus includes a lot of code, and not 
many comments.


I suggest forming small teams to work on specific projects. Each team 
should include one of the AOO-experienced developers, and one or more 
newcomers. As newcomers learn one or more areas of AOO they should be 
able to themselves serve as a team expert, getting more developers 
productive.


Any AOO expert need an assistant to work, with some direction, on a project?

Patricia

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gbuild-reintegration branch

[Damjan Jovanovic]

Hi

I've begun work on reintegrating the (entire) gbuild branch into
trunk, but it's very difficult: there are missing files, most commits
don't build, files were added and deleted en-mass separately from the
commits that need them, and license headers were only added much
later. Trying to keep trunk in a working state with every commit and
always have ASLv2 headers on every file is very difficult, and means I
cannot commit partial fixes, so I have to build up an enormous working
copy of many changes first that can easily break.

Instead I'll be branching trunk to
^/openoffice/branches/gbuild-reintegration, then merging the gbuild
branch into that branch in small increments, and then at the end
merging gbuild-reintegration back into trunk.

Regards
Damjan

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Re: Some thoughts on the learning curve

[Pedro Giffuni]

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.





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Re: Some thoughts on the learning curve

[#PATHANGI JANARDHANAN JATINSHRAVAN#]

Hi, 
I am one of the newcomers you speak about, I’m a college undergraduate 
trying to do something with AOO, and yes, I also find the learning curve quite 
steep. I started out gradually, and was focussing on implementing the bitwise 
functions in calc at the start. I must say here that Damjan Jovanovic provided 
some excellent guidance and responded to my emails with patience and knowledge, 
and that really helped me a lot. Many thanks to him.

I’m now caught up in a pretty hectic semester, with signal processing courses 
that I’m finding difficult to grasp, so I haven’t gotten that much time lately 
to work on AOO, but I plan to make some time for it and develop an extension to 
the existing match function (I’ve started on this). I’ve made the decision to 
mostly focus on Calc for now, since that is the area I’ve started out with and 
it is what I’m slowly getting more familiarity with.


Thanks
Jatin




On 2/21/16, 12:03 PM, "Pedro Giffuni"  wrote:

>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.
>
>
>
>
>
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>To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org
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>

RE: Some thoughts on the learning curve

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

I sympathize with Pedro's observation.

Meanwhile, although I am not an expert, I could stand to buddy up on the 
following profile-related situation: 
.

If I had to name one absolutely critical situation it has to do with AOO 
release engineering.  As far as I can tell, there is too much tacit knowledge 
still involved with producing a release and too much happening out of sight.  
There are things that need to be done to make that easier and more repeatable.  
And that means having several able to be release manager.  That's a critical 
mentoring need.

At the ASF, projects live or die on the ability to make releases.  The usual 
sign of demise is lacking enough PMC members to provide the necessary binding 
votes.  We are probably close to that.  But even more limiting is the ability 
to make release candidates that there can be binding votes for.

It doesn't matter what we fix if we can't ship it.

 - Dennis

> -Original Message-
> From: Patricia Shanahan [mailto:p...@acm.org]
> Sent: Saturday, February 20, 2016 18:19
> To: dev@openoffice.apache.org
> Subject: Some thoughts on the learning curve
> 
> One of the biggest problems facing AOO is getting new developers up to
> speed.
> 
> As I understand it, there is a small group of developers who do
> understand AOO, but do not have anywhere near enough time to do
> everything that needs doing. Meanwhile, you have newcomers with various
> levels of experience who would like to help, but don't know where to
> start.
> 
> Even for someone like me who has previously worked on large programs, up
> to and including operating systems, AOO is a formidable body of code. I
> have started trying to study the profile system, since it seems to be a
> problem area, but even that narrow focus includes a lot of code, and not
> many comments.
> 
> I suggest forming small teams to work on specific projects. Each team
> should include one of the AOO-experienced developers, and one or more
> newcomers. As newcomers learn one or more areas of AOO they should be
> able to themselves serve as a team expert, getting more developers
> productive.
> 
> Any AOO expert need an assistant to work, with some direction, on a
> project?
> 
> Patricia
> 
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> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org


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Re: Some thoughts on the learning curve

[Patricia Shanahan]

On 2/20/2016 8:39 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:

I sympathize with Pedro's observation.

Meanwhile, although I am not an expert, I could stand to buddy up on
the following profile-related situation:
.


Looks interesting. I am familiar with pthread and memory management 
issues, so it may be a good area for me to work on.


Patricia



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