Revision as of 09:41, 29 May 2007

Engineering Steering Committee Meetings Minutes

The Engineering Steering Committee meets every two weeks on Monday 4pm UTC (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html).

agenda for next meetings

2007-06-11

• Process for locating suitable QA person
• User-Experience consultation time-outs ?
• ... any other business, followed by ...
• regular review of long-term road-blocked patches:
  • double click to rename sheet
  • trivial warning fix
  • insert note tweak
  • trivial warning fix
  • -dontstrip installer option
  • increase graphics cache size

open agenda items

• OpenOffice.org source control system (SCM): what is the roadmap for the future ?

Minutes

2007-05-28

participants: Mathias Bauer, Xiuzhi Cheng, Martin Hollmichel, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Volker Quetschke,

Problems of build creation / provision for QA

• Nesshof: chicken & egg problem - not used much so not that reliable.
• cmc: Tried to use Sun-Win1 once, but took a whole day to build, and not reliable. Need ability to patch out known bugs in the master.
• Nesshof: poke ChristianL / the tinderbox mailing list, we need a common effort to make it work.
• cmc: the Mac tinderboxes work really well, well maintained, great to see.
• mmeeks: what does 'we' mean wrt. common effort.
• Nesshof: mainly ChristianL
• mmeeks: it is the Sun requirement for 2 platforms that kills lots of incoming CWS' though
• Nesshof: ause maintains Sun-Win1, xp-1-3 are ex. Intel & dead.
• cmc: while can make Win32 builds with LCC etc. now - huge effort & when Vista arrives - ~impossible.
• vq: can volunteer to do CWS builds for individuals occasionally
• mmeeks: best to have a repeatable, automated process: why does Sun have a totally separate, internal process so they don't share the pain / testing / benefits ?
• mba: there are shared developer machines inside Sun for CWS building - but highly loaded, not using build-bot, and building with the StarOffice pieces.
• Nesshof: new win32 build machine coming, perhaps can get one more from OO.o Ev. - 2 should do perhaps.
• mmeeks: would be good if Sun people could use it too; to share the fun.

Finding QA for workspaces

• cmc: how do you find the right QA engineer for a workspace ?
• mmeeks: the canonical page is: DomainDeveloper
• cmc: but surely these guys don't just want these to drop out of the blue ?
• Nesshof: postpone until next time for Nils.
• mmeeks: anything else ? RCS discussion ?
• Nesshof: postpone RCS discussion until ready.

regular review of long-term road-blocked patches

fpicker problems

• cmc: the process required a build on 2 Unix's including Solaris - the build-bot wouldn't work, gave up in disgust / deleted the CWS many months ago. It would be nice to have a policy change - if a change affects only Unix - we need only build it on one Unix platform: not Win32 too.
• mba/mmeeks: rant elided.
• mba: It's clear (to a developer) no Win32 code touched here at all, Unix/Gtk+ only fpicker change < later mmeeks note: the multi-selection fix, also touched core code ... >
• cmc: not doing the work again here; simply not touching this.
• mba: need to ask Nils: getting an exception from dual-platform builds for this case: seems acceptable to me.
• mmeeks: interesting that the experience here turned a friendly, rational, balanced person against touching this again: consider if cmc was not paid to work with OO.o.

calc: improved formula entry

autofilter options

password dialog itch

auto-correction fix

2007-05-14

participants: Mathias Bauer, Xiuzhi Cheng, Martin Hollmichel, Pavel Janik, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Nils Fuhrmann, Volker Quetschke,

regular review of long-term road-blocked patches

calc: persist csv import settings

• mmeeks: walk through of the timeline
• mba: something that the IRT/IIT metrics don't catch
• mba: UE team don't track issues regularly & Falko left
• mmeeks: It seems some people (UE) demand their say, but then don't say anything.
• mba: didn't we suggest timeouts for non-controversial changes before ? here for User Experience ?
• mmeeks: yes - but discarded by QA previously, as part of stymied new inclusion work-flow.
• Nesshof: did you consider mailing dev@specs to ping them ?
• mmeeks: no; we don't have the issue in our ooo-builds, why burn yet more time here ?

gsl: image shrink - ka009

• mba: talked to KaiA today, for an explanation. Not a high priority for him, and a wide change, somehow always other higher priority tasks.
• mmeeks: why such a huge problem for QA ? what would these guys do ?
• nils: (after introduction) - depends on the change: run the test-tool over it, and poke on specifics identified by the developer. Looked at this CWS - it was resynched many times, but never marked 'Ready for QA'.
• mmeeks: can we accelerate the QA process with tooling ?
• mba: plenty of examples of internal Sun CWS' that until now also never made it, priorities changed etc. Surely Novell can do QA on it themselves ? (perhaps problems with multiple platforms) ?
• mmeeks: we can do that, but we already ship it to our customers, we tested it ourselves etc. what more needs doing ? we filed up-stream for patch review: no response.
• mba: patch review is not possible for all patches; huge backlog of them, and the burden is too high.
• mmeeks: it is not a goal then to review all patches ?
• mba: it's the goal but we can't guarantee an integration in a defined time frame; we also have to fight against the backlog (the issues discussed here mostly belong to it)
• mmeeks: I expect (from other projects) that there is a maintainer / gate-keeper for all code, that is ultimately responsible, and cares about that code and that has the final say for inclusion; is that not the case in OO.o ?
• Nesshof: not totally true - project leads should be able to find people with some interest in a piece of code to do some review. The idea is everyone can change any code, there is no dedicated ownership.
• mba: lots of old code, some modules may have no assigned maintainer that knows the code as well as the original developers. Code reviews alone don't guarantee fast integration of patches. Mozilla is a project with excessive use of code reviews. It is notorious to be slow at responding to patches. Not all Open Source projects have a clear maintainership structure. OO.o can't be compared with anything else, mainly due to its history, but also because of its many millions of lines.
• mmeeks: well, it's really unusual (in my experience) not to have anyone responsible for each bit of code; it needs documenting.

to be continued ...

• Nesshof: can continue the rest via E-mail
• mmeeks: not interested directly in solving the issues, but understanding them, and learning about process problems from them.
• mba: Proposal for "lessons learned from the patches": developers sending patches to UEx/QA whatever should still be considered to be responsible. Developers asked for a code review should react more reliably. If developers feel overwhelmed by a patch they should make this clear.

coordinating the next feature releases

Clarify what the important issues for the next releases are, who is doing what work, next major version of OpenOffice.org

• Nesshof: Please update Features page with details.
• Nesshof: we're looking to do a 3.0 release Q3 2008 (what would be 2.5) - what do people think ?
• mmeeks: a marketing decision right ?
• Nesshof: yes, we continue 6monthly releases until then.

coordination of new features

We just experience that two groups Novell and CH2000 are working on the same feature (text grid control)

• mmeeks: This is an issue of CH2000 not doing their work in a public fashion, Novell consulted, blogged, and took this to the ODF TC.
• mba: Writer developers of CH2000 mostly doing bug fixes and new feature bits in writer core and layout. We will discuss all work done together with them on the dev mailing list of the sw project.
• xiuzhi: to avoid the confilt with other volunteers again,I will give a list of new features we will submit to OOo.

2007-04-30

participants: cmc, mh, pjanik, vq

1. IRC, Telecon, Telecon/IRC, Skype meetings?

mh will provide dial in number until May 14th Idea: should we try using e.g. Skype?

2. Nils, Xiuzhi and Dieter will be added to the list.

3. AI: mmeeks will provide list of top 10 patches and we will try to cover first 2 - 3 in a meeting ?