ESC budget item review meeting minutes: 2023-06-22

Thu Jun 22 16:43:08 UTC 2023

* 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