[Libreoffice-qa] ESC budget item review meeting minutes: 2023-06-22

Thorsten Behrens thb at documentfoundation.org
Tue Jun 27 01:44:54 UTC 2023


Hi Eyal,

[adding dev & qa list back - f'up to there, I'd say, project@ is more
 for general announcements]

my personal take would be - we should indeed outline a bit better,
what formal requirements the ESC has, to be able to evaluate such
tender proposals. Hossein already mentioned some minimum verbosity,
such that someone independent, but skilled in the art, can judge a
submission.

I would hesitate to prescribe any particular 'kind' of work. Whatever
the project members deem important should go there - if, what & when
to do it, is then up to the ESC to decide.

What is useful to mention though, is that successful proposals almost
always are from, or are supported by, someone with technical
background. Finding an ESC member to refine & lobby for one's proposal
also tends to be a good idea.

Best, Thorsten

Eyal Rozenberg wrote:
> So, even though the ranking is not in yet, I want to use the opportunity
> and ask the members and officers who attended this year's meeting, and
> rankings in previous years, to consider trying to author some guidelines
> regarding what constitutes a "good" tender proposal, e.g.:
> 
> * Larger or smaller amount of work?
> * Features or bug/misdesign fixes?
> * Proposals which can be broken down easily into smaller pieces of work,
> or rather work that is somewhat atomic and unlikely to be done
> incrementally?
> * Improvements to more commonly-used apps and parts of the code, or
> rather improvements to the less popular ones which are unlikely to
> result in sufficient pressure from the user base to make happen?
> * Work that is only apriori relevant to some category of users (e.g.
> people with disabilities, specific language groups etc.), or work that
> is more universally relevant?
> 
> Now, I realize that different people have different ideas regarding what
> the tendering priorities should be, and of course this may also tie in
> to the ongoing arguments regarding TDF-ecosystem-company relations, but
> - it's all fine as long as you separate what you-personally believe is
> better from what has, in recent years, gotten more support and ranked up.
> 
> Eyal
> 
> 
> 
> On 22/06/2023 19:43, Ilmari Lauhakangas wrote:
> > * Present:
> >      + Affiliated with TDF: Ilmari Lauhakangas, Xisco Faulí, Heiko
> > Tietze, Florian Effenberger, Italo Vignoli, Khaled Hosny, Sophie
> > Gautier, Olivier Hallot, Christian Lohmaier, Stéphane Guillou, Hossein
> > Nourikhah
> >      + Affiliated with Collabora: Tomaž Vajngerl, Justin Luth
> >      + Affiliated with allotropia: Thorsten Behrens
> >      + Affiliated with Omnis Cloud Sarl (or TDF Board?): Paolo Vecchi
> >      + Affiliated with Red Hat: Stephan Bergmann
> >      + Unaffiliated: V Stuart Foote, Regina Henschel, Simon Phipps,
> > Gerald Pfeifer
> > 
> > * current version of the proposal was sent to board at 15.06.23, 11:24
> >    * starts with section "Preamble" and ends with "Database Rights On
> > The Transparency Section"
> >    * 2.823 words, 16.737 characters
> >    * tdf_budget_2023-06-12_comments_CP-clean.odt
> >    * SHA256:
> > 4890a4f9c5bec212ea56997c4056af0389d99e618ebeac66e1abf25c6f67e14e
> > * shared with the ESC end of April (27/04/2023) was this:
> > 
> >           https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/YprpsFP45z7a7p3
> > 
> > * ESC version is ~4-5 weeks, w/o preamble and w/o board decision bits
> > 
> > Registration of Affiliation
> > 
> > "Means a person:
> >      • acting as a representative of;
> >      • OR is a legal representative of;
> >      • OR is an employee of;
> >      • OR is a current consultant to;
> >      • OR is a former employee of OR former consultant (unless a
> > sufficient amount of time has elapsed since the relevant relationship
> > has ended) to
> > a relevant entity OR of an entity which is
> >      • controlled by;
> >      • OR controls;
> >      • OR is under a common control with;
> >      • OR shares substantial business interest, including by way of
> >          ◦ long term economic relationship;
> >          ◦ OR commercial partnership, distributorship or similar;
> >          ◦ OR business coordination agreements, including consortia;
> >          ◦ OR any kind of agreement that limit the competition against
> > each other – especially in the same fields as where the TDF operates –
> > with;
> >      • OR operates in a joint venture with
> > a relevant entity. For the sake of clarification, being a member of a
> > general business association (such as a guild) OR of a Free Software
> > association (such as the FSFE, OSI and OSI Affiliates, Open Forum
> > Europe, OpenUK, OW2, Eclipse Foundation, FFII, SFC, KDE, The Linux
> > Foundation) would not create an Affiliation."
> > 
> > "In order to avoid COI for those participating in ESC voting as per this
> > Section, a voting member or a member applying to participate in the
> > select committee as provided by the Ranking section MUST declare whether
> > they are Affiliate to an entity which intends to place bids on the
> > tenders resulting from the Technical Budgeting OR, on their honour,
> > whether they are aware of any such potential situation could reasonably
> > materialize between the date of the vote and the date of tendering."
> > 
> > "Voting on a matter OR making a determination while being in a COI
> > situation on the subject matter, OR not declaring a potential COI as per
> > the Declaration Of Potential Conflict Section is per se a COI and ground
> > for exclusion from the tendering procedure, if at least one of the
> > entities to which the member is Affiliate places a bid in a tender
> > resulting form the Technical Budgeting."
> > 
> > Preparations
> > 
> >   * blogpost with call for proposals was published with more than 15
> > days deadline
> >   * wiki page was available for everyone to edit
> >   * ESC minutes were shared publicly and sent to mailing lists
> >   * today's call was announced publicly
> >   * ranking spreadsheet was always public in an up to date version
> > 
> > Pending items
> > 
> >   * transparency section of the website must be in place before
> > tendering starts, Italo is working on it
> >   * blogpost with ranking spreadsheet must be published as soon as that
> > one is finalized
> > 
> > Proposals
> > 
> >   * No paid external expert was requested.
> >   * No urgency request was made.
> >   * Do all proposals on today's list have a sufficient description and
> > cost estimate? Yes.
> >   * Have all cost estimates been re-evaluated by only non-conflicted
> > members of the ESC? Yes.
> > 
> > Ranking
> > 
> >   * ALL proposals must be ranked.
> >   * Proposal by a committee that has a majority of non-Conflicted members.
> >   * Decision then by CONSENSUS of only the non-Conflicted members.
> >   * Failing that, majority VOTE by only non-Conflicted members.
> > 
> >      * Spreadsheet with comments from TDF staff:
> > https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/i9CSEs2gjFisc2y
> > 
> > * Budget pages for reference:
> >      + https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2021
> >      + https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2022
> >      + https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2023
> > 
> > * Thorsten noticed this item from 2022 was not estimated:
> > https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2022#Missing_ODF_Features:_Concentric_gradient_fill_of_custom-shapes
> >    there's likely more - e.g.Bridge the gap between drawinglayer and
> > VCL,              Bitmaps in vcl: Use a native format/depth etc..
> > 
> > * Procedure to rank: go through the items and arrive at a consensus, for
> > 2023, use ranking from February 2023 (Ilmari)
> > 
> > * Propose to drop it
> >      + Automated test tools for finding text rendering defects
> >      + Rolling Release: Finish MAR-based autoupdater for Windows (2021)
> >      + Stabilize cross-page table layouting (2022)
> >      + Improve the experience of the CPP SDK
> >        + Hossein working on it
> >      + UNO API changes subscription/feedback channel (2022)
> >        + Cloph/Guilhem on it - can be done in a week, by end of the year
> > (?)
> >      + Regular scan-build reports like we do with CppCheck (2022)
> >        + Cloph can do it, just hook up existing cppcheck as jenkins job
> >      https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/cppcheck_reports/master/
> > 
> > * Propose to put it on hold for now
> >      + XLSX Aggressive Competitors tracker: table styles (ranked 6 in
> > Feb 2023)
> > 
> >          + has a dependency which needs to be completed first
> > 
> >      + Power optimization research (ranked 43 in Feb 2023)
> > 
> > * Propose to split it into smaller tenders
> >      + Missing ODF Features (general collection)
> > 
> > * Reviewed items
> >      + Cleanup & further improve ODF conformance (2021)
> >      + Convert Impress slideshow to drawinglayer primitives (2021)
> >      + Font subsetter for font embedding (2022)
> >      + XLSX Aggressive Competitors tracker: gridlines for 3d line charts
> > (2022)
> >      + Look-ahead styleref field for Writer (2022)
> >      + Normalized spell checking (2022)
> >      + SVG rendering improvements (ranked 4 in Feb 2023)
> >      + Remove/Replace usages of XOR-Paint (2022)
> >      + XLSX Aggressive Competitors tracker: support math equations in
> > Calc shapes (ranked 12 in Feb 2023)
> >      + Missing ODF Features: The attribute draw:text-rotate-angle is
> > interpreted, but there exists no user interface to change it. (ranked 33
> > in Feb 2023)
> >      + Missing ODF Features: Attribute svg:d of <draw:path> some of the
> > possible commands are missing (ranked 30 in Feb 2023)
> >      + Missing ODF Features: Draw:shadow-offset-x/y only partially
> > implemented (ranked 38 in Feb 2023)
> >      + Missing ODF Feature: <draw:regular-polygon> missing completely
> > (ranked 33 in Feb 2023)
> >      + Replace remaining Carbon functions with non-Carbon functions
> > (macOS) (ranked 38 in Feb 2023)
> >      + Tests for drawinglayer and basegfx (ranked 41 in Feb 2023)
> >      + Bitmaps in vcl: Merge RGB and A layer into one (2022)
> >      + Make Firebird implementation production-ready (ranked 3 in Feb 2023)
> >      + ODT export nondeterminism (2022)
> >      + Writer tables: support cell margins (next to cell padding) (2021)
> >      + Rotated Writer TextFrames (ranked 9 in Feb 2023)
> >      + Allow inline graphics, formulas in impress (and draw), open
> > equation with inline formulas from PPT, PPS, PPTX, PPSX (ranked 1 in Feb
> > 2023)
> >      + Slideshow: rendering content on top of videos (ranked 19 in Feb
> > 2023)
> > 
> > * Ilmari proposed to follow up via email to get a consensus vote on the
> > ranking of the reviewed items. Ordering would be: items from 2021 and
> > 2022 followed by items from 2023 sorted by the February 2023 ranking
> >      + The proposal was supported by: V Stuart Foote [unaffiliated],
> > Heiko Tietze [TDF], Xisco Faulí [TDF], Christian Lohmaier [TDF], Hossein
> > Nourikhah [TDF], Ilmari Lauhakangas [TDF] and Thorsten Behrens [allotropia]
> >      + No one opposed the proposal
> > 
> > * For reference, top 15 still relevant ideas from the February 2023 ESC
> > ranking:
> >      1: Allow inline graphics, formulas in impress (and draw), open
> > equation with inline formulas from PPT, PPS, PPTX, PPSX
> >      2: Migrating to single modern 2D graphics library
> >      3: Make Firebird implementation production-ready
> >      4: SVG rendering improvements
> >      5: Fix unreliable unit tests
> >      6: XLSX Aggressive Competitors tracker: table styles
> >      9: Rotated Writer TextFrames
> >      9: Continuous Section Breaks
> >      12: XLSX Aggressive Competitors tracker: support math equations in
> > Calc shapes
> >      13: 3D rotation of Impress shapes
> >      14: Chart creation speed
> >      17: Split-pane documents
> >      17: Improve visual appearance of tracked changes
> >      17: Unit in numerical inputs
> >      19: Add more combo chart types
> 

-- 
Thorsten Behrens, Director, Member of the Board
The Document Foundation, Winterfeldtstraße 52, 10781 Berlin, DE
Rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint
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