Hi Terry, Paul, *
- caution: long posting! -
as you probably know, the project is huge. Many volunteers devote some
time to it - more or less, as much they are willing / able to
contribute. To keep this large project workable there are different
mailing lists for several purposes, and not everybody is aware of which
list to address in order to find the right person to reply.
I'm subscribed to nearly 40 mailing lists - and I'm sorry to neglect
[EMAIL PROTECTED] as I don't have the time to read and reply to this mass of mails.
I read two main concerns out of your mails:
1) Proposals have not been supported in a way you hoped for.
2) The web pages are not intuitive to navigate if you want to contribute
and help more than you do by now.
For the first point there are several possible replies. In my eyes some
important ones are:
- Volunteer programmers only code the feature they personally think to
be the most important one.
- Paid programmers work on the features their employer/sponsor pays for.
- Volunteer/sponsored programmers without a specific goal try to fix as
many bugs and to introduce as many new features as possible in the given
amount of time they are able to contribute.
For this third category (and in my eyes most of the Sun contributors are
in that category) user's wishes are one part of the decision making
process, as well as the probable coding effort to implement the feature
/ fix the bug and other reasons. Revealing this decision making to the
broader community would help to avoid misunderstandings and negative
feelings.
And at this point there are possibilities to discuss these decisions
directly with the developers - mainly in the appropriate issue.
This way lead to a few, but remarkable changes in OOo's behavior in the
past and I'm quite sure that the distance between developers and the
non-coding projects inside OpenOffice.org will continue to be reduced in
future.
It's true that sometimes there are negative reactions in some mails not
at all able to invite people to join our community and spend their time.
But we all are human beings with better or worse days, and who knows,
which are the trigger words for anybody else to become angry?
My personal experience: If we (as users or non-coding community members)
try to understand what developers and long-time / important
contributors want to achieve and ask for explanations why they want to
do it, there is quite a good chance to find a common solution. Of course
there are exceptions with long-time differences, different political
strategies and personal issues among central project members, but these
are only a few (and don't have a chance to be solved but by direct
contact, IMHO - repeating well-known POVs over and over again might be
counterproductive).
So my conclusion: Try to get into contact to a developer able to do what
you want to be done and convince him! This needs time - but just to
propose something and wait for it's implementation is not the way
OpenOffice.org does work.
This leads to point 2):
It is not intuitive how to contribute to the project.
There are several web pages describing how to do that (starting with the
"Contributing" link on the home page). If they are not clear enough,
please tell the responsible people and attach your proposal for
optimization. But remember: Most of them are volunteers as well and
probably spent a lot of time in that work. So a comment "it sucks"
doesn't help anything (other people managed to contribute), but avoids
further exploration by the responsible people.
Our main communication forum are the mailing lists, so if there is no
responsible maintainer noticed on the page you want to be optimized (you
probably don't want to criticize ;-)), please subscribe to the
dev@<project-name> mailing list and raise the topic there.
We need our web pages to be improved - so don't hesitate to help us.
Further comments inline...
Terry schrieb:
Daniel Kasak wrote:
Terry wrote:
I've had a taste of one of the distribution problems. Several people
have had problems getting isos. The bittorrent link for the "extras"
iso does not work, and with good reason: there appears to be no iso.
This would be a topic for the cdrom@distribution.openoffice.org mailing
list. Please have a look at the archive to find out if there has already
been given a reason why this issue is still alive.
I'm not part of that project, but probably there are more problems with
personal resources than technical effects. The germanophone
cdrom-project (subproject of de.openoffice.org) tries to stay up-to-date
with it's (mainly German) CD and DVD iso called PrOOo-Box (online
version at http://live.prooo-box.org), but we are 1 to 2 weeks behind
the official releases even we have a couple of very active contributors.
[...]
That's what you get from a largely volunteer-based effort. It's no
good complaining from the sidelines. Offer to help.
As I said, I've been looking for a way to help. That's made more
difficult than it needs to be.
Please show where these problems should be fixed.
What you are really saying is that you can't take criticism, which is
the attitude of most of your colleagues.
Depends on the kind of criticism: If you criticize in order to improve
things (and people understand this aim!), it is highly appreciated. If
you propose a way to do so or want to spend some time on it, even better!
Sometimes mails are misinterpreted - people feel offended even if the
poster didn't mean it.
I hope the project succeeds but, if it does, it'll be more by luck than
good planning.
That's not really positive, but shows lots of frustration.
By the way: Good planning is not easy in a volunteers world where
everybody is able to say: No, that's not my way, I stop contributing...
I'll continue lending assistance to other users when I can.
Thanks for that.
Instinctively, I recoil from any closer contact. I've acquired
"observer" status for issues, which is a glorified way of changing
nothing.
You mean observer status in the qa project? (I wasn't able to find an
issue project)
You must have asked for this status - why did you?
The qa project's website tells about asking for canconfirm privileges if
you want to work on issues - observer status shows that you are part of
that project and get the project's announcements on your personal
starting page after logging in.
I have no idea what I'm supposed to do next and I've been
required to join a mailing list for some reason which was not explained
and isn't apparent.
Which list? Why isn't it apparent? Please tell me (offlist, if you want).
Time is precious. One day, when I have nothing else to do, I'll go back
to the website and see if I can make sense of my "new" status.
Or ask someone to help you finding your way through it.
Best regards
Bernhard
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