On 27/06/2008, at 12:23 AM, Alex Thurgood wrote:
Clytie and I are qa'ers, and I am not a hard coder (I can't speak for Clytie). Speaking for myself, I do not read each and every single mail that floats by on this list, nor do I have the time to follow the developers' blogs. I was just confirming Clytie's remarks as to whether the behaviour appeared to be general instability with the product. If now, we are expected to follow each and every CWS that goes into the product, and accompanying message, well quite frankly I can spend my time better elsewhere, or am I to understand that volunteers are only welcome if they can read various forms of programming language and know how each of the individual modules works ? If I limit my remarks to the qa list, will they go unnoticed ? More than likely yes, since apart from the devs themselves, we are the ones providing feedback for the Mac product, and most of the mac devs, don't AFAIK (I'm willing to stand corrected), frequent the general qa list.What good is it to me as a tester to know that CWS xyz is being integrated in mXX, when all that is available on the servers is m21 ? The announcement for m21 only came out yesterday or the day before, hardly old hat is it ?Whatever, forget it, I'm outta here.
Alex, don't give up! It's natural, if rather frustrating for us, if developers working hard on a particular port or component assume everyone else on the list has the same POV. We wouldn't have the software without their single-minded dedication, so we need to be patient, if we can.
We _are_ seeing improvement with each piece of code integrated in the main codeline. It's a pity that OpenOffice.org is such a complex project, so that you have to spend so much time on so many different mailing lists, and learn so many different terms and procedures, to have any real idea about what's going on, but having done that, don't throw your advantage away. Stick around and be part of OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac OSX. ;)
I'm a communicator: I spend much of my time at OpenOffice.org welcoming and introducing people, supporting new members, building bridges and making sure information flows across them. In my coding days, I wouldn't have been able to split my concentration that much.
So our single-minded coders aren't necessarily aware of the needs of other members, but they do learn from our feedback. Just as we learn from what they tell us. eric's already said he'll try to find the time to summarize recent changes.
A "sticky" post on a forum would be a good way to keep track of things like this. "Sticky" posts avoid a lot of re-hashing the same issues. There's already a Mac sub-forum [1] at the OpenOffice.org Community Forums: why don't we create some "sticky" posts summarizing the current situation? We could also link to the mac-porting site and FAQ.
Just point to or list the info you'd like included in some "sticky", locked posts: I suggest three separate posts:
1. Installing on Mac OSX 2. Compatibility (OSX and other software) 3. Progress (improvements and bugs)Forums typically have sticky, locked posts like these at the top, to avoid people asking the same questions again, and to provide quick, current info.
Does anyone here spend time on the forum? I've just started doing so, and I'll be there regularly to support Vietnamese users in our upcoming Vietnamese-language sub-forum. So I'm happy to help Mac users as well, if I can. Alex, how about we use our communication skills? :)
from Clytie Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team http://vnoss.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:l10n [1] http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewforum.php?f=17&sid=9feaff7f2818e00a7961ac2079cd173b
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