I favor Pedro's approach. I don't know that it is so much about LibreOffice wanting to be being different from Apache OOo, although that might be in the thinking of some (on either project). LibreOffice has almost a year of active development separate from OpenOffice.org, and Apache OOo has not even had code to kick around until the past few weeks.
I can't follow Michael Meeks' numbers, and I definitely can't follow the math that the subsequent report comes up with. It seems to me that cherry-picking by a fork is always the situation and not one that there is much to say about. Also, the desire to refactor the code base, including the repositories and the build process, was proclaimed as an opportunity for LibreOffice practically from the start, nearly one year ago. OpenOffice.org did not follow that same course and divergence seems to have happened on both sides since the fork point. Bringing the code to Apache OOo is introducing more divergence. I am heartened that there are seasoned OO.o developers working here as committers and also on LibreOffice. There are additional LibreOffice developers who contribute on ooo-dev, ask questions at general-incubator and legal-discuss, etc. Opportunities for making the Apache OOo releases appealing to downstream adopters is something that will need to be worked out over time by folks with understanding of both sides of the transfer opportunities. Cross pollination on fixes for common bugs would also be good. In short, do good work and play nice? -----Original Message----- From: Pedro F. Giffuni [mailto:giffu...@tutopia.com] Sent: Monday, September 12, 2011 18:37 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: Is there anything we can do to make AOOo code more usable by LibreOffice? Hi Rob; --- On Mon, 9/12/11, Rob Weir wrote: .. > > I'd summarize it as saying that merging code Apache code > into LibreOffice will be really difficult, especially > since LibreOffice has made widespread source changes. > > Is there anything we can do to help LibreOffice out here? > Develop faster ... do everything they do ... just kidding! ;). They have done some things that we want to do too but all in all we are mostly standing still (for good reasons, we want to be stable in our first release) and it's them diverging: ultimately if they want to be different they will be. > > Anything else we should be doing? (Or not doing?) > At this point we have to try to rescue all we can from Oracle: this means getting most all the useful stuff from the CWSs, which is of benefit to all the community. We also have to replace some copyleft code, and what we have to do here is not simply remove it but instead replace it with stuff so good that LO will want to go through the effort of bringing our changes. Hmm.. there are also 24 issues they identified in our code and fixed in their's. We may end up catching up in many things but at the end I do think there will be a situation where LO and OO differentiate significantly: I don't think that's necessarily bad though. cheers, Pedro.
