Predictably, I prefer approach I on first principles: Never derail the train that's running.
>From that perspective, there's all of this: - All of the developers and many testers and others know how to build AOO 3.4.0 including people who are working from the source tarball and the folks working on LibreOffice and other co-dependents as well - the current community includes those who build special distros (of OOo and LO), provide QA that serves all of us, etc. - There is still IP clearance to be done on the Symphony contribution bits and that can be worked through selectively as staging of features/fixes before merging to the SVN trunk. - Alignment of the symphony code can be done off-trunk with merging of selected features and fixes on an iterative basis accompanied by testing of various kinds and localized attention to build breakers and other potential regressions. - There is an abundance of bug reports and analysis based on the current lineage. - All of the documentation, forum contributions, MediaWiki and user lists are currently oriented around the OOo-lineage and they need to be morphed in a progressive way, not a sudden switch. - Users and others may like new features but for many sudden switches are unsettling - Plan II could end up with us having to maintain OOo-lineage releases and Symphony-merged releases concurrently. That is a frightening prospect. It is like forking ourselves and maintaining both forks. - Then there's the localizations, etc. that would crash against the forked support, etc. Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Rob Weir [mailto:robw...@apache.org] Sent: Monday, June 11, 2012 18:08 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org Subject: Next steps for Symphony and AOO As we wait [0] for the Symphony [1] code to be loaded into Subversion I think it would be good to start a discussion on "next steps" of how we can make best use of this contribution. Hopefully you've had time to review the list of features on the wiki [2], install one of the binaries [3] , or maybe even download the source [4] and try to build it [5]. As will see by your examination, the Symphony code base has co-evolved with OpenOffice.org for several years now, and continued to co-evolve with Apache OpenOffice even recently. Symphony has many features and bug fixes that AOO lacks. And there are areas where Symphony is missing enhancements or bug fixes that are in OpenOffice. Our challenge is to find the best way to bring these two code bases together, to make the best product. I think there are two main approaches to this problem: I. Merge code, from Symphony, feature by feature, into AOO, in a prioritized order. This is the "slow" approach, since it would take (by the estimates I've seen) a couple of years to bring all of the Symphony enhancements and bug fixes over to AOO. II. Use Symphony as the the new base, and merge (over time) AOO (and OOo) enhancements and bug fixes into the new trunk. This approach quickly gives a new UI, something we could fairly call Apache OpenOffice 4.0. But this approach would also give us some short-term pain. For example, those involved in porting AOO 3.4 would need to merge their patches into the new trunk. We'd need to update license headers again. Help files and translation are done differently in Symphony, and so on. Looked at another way, option I is a slow, but easy path. Option II is a leap forward, but will be initially more work and disruption. Evolution versus Revolution. So let's discuss. Please ask questions about the pro's and con's of each approach. The code and binaries are all posted, and my IBM colleagues in Beijing are happy to answer your questions. Regards, -Rob [0] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-4799 [1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Symphony [2] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Symphony_contribution [3] http://people.apache.org/~zhangjf/symphony/build/ [4] https://svn-master.apache.org/repos/test/danielsh/symphony-import/ [5] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/How_to_build_Symphony%27s_source_code
