Enrique wrote:
The whole point about this issue and similar ones is that many of us do not understand who ever asked to remove that menu from the quickstart (is an example). There was an issue on that?
It is my impression that this one started as cleaning up the menu and additionally was part of a larger effort to provide desktop integration in a consistent way and conforming to the target platforms' style guidelines. Apparently the Windows style guide discourages duplicating the start menu functionality in the task bar. And it seems that someone misread this part of the style guide to imply that we shouldn't have any launcher items in that menu.
Many of us think that developers are willing to add features, not to remove them. It is in human nature that a less change (less freedom, less option, less function, less money) will be reacted much more that a positive change. If you add something, probably get some congratulations from some people. If you remove it, you bet even those who do not use it will complain.
Not necessarily. Some people do complain that they are overwhelmed with choices and functions and prefer a leaner interface. Look at the difference between mozilla and firefox. For firefox they removed many things from mozilla, yet it is much more successful today. There are some detail capabilities from mozilla I miss in firefox, but I still find it more usable in most ways.
I do not know about SUN deadlines, but the community is not imposing a deadline on 2.0.
There are so many voices in the community that demand the 2.0 rather sooner than later. And currently OOo probably cannot deviate very much from any Sun deadlines. The solution for this going forward could be the exact opposite of delaying the release: put out releases much more often (maybe every 6 months). This discussion has been started on the OOoCon 2004 and is still ongoing.
If a *functional* beta were out for longer, the quality
control process by final users would be much better. You may understand that users want to test the things working. Perhaps reading the spec doc we do not realize at first the problems that may arise.
The feedback from Beta should allow eliminating major bugs, including some usability bugs. But a redesign of larger features with significant UI changes is not possible, if we don't want to delay the release indefinitely.
As for RFE, its new for me. I am used to RFEs in the Python community. I only hope OOo new RFE procedure will be as transparent and dynamical as Python´s. There announcements are very clearly marked in the general list and main page, opinions and votes raised outside core developers, and decisions well explained before commited.
This may be a question of scale. OOo is probably too large a project with too many things happening simultaneously to do it this way. Also in OOo the difference in perception and understanding between the developers and the end users, is probably much larger than for Python (where the end users are developers themselves).
And they have an excellent track of backwards compatibility! These newsgroups are a direct source of user feedback on OOo developers. Please, do not dismiss them in favor of more in house development.
Actually few developers read the discuss list with any regularity. But there are plenty of developer lists on which most of the development happens very much in the open.
To really bridge the gap between end users and developers something new is needed, IMHO.
Ciao, Joerg
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