[Libreoffice-qa] minutes of ESC call ...

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Pedro,

	First - I hope you had a good break over Christmas / the new year etc.

On Tue, 2013-01-08 at 06:55 -0800, Pedro wrote:
> Does this mean LibreoOffice is not going back to <arch>_<language>???

	That's the current plan. The original decision was that creating 100x
the size of what we have now creates significant up-load and build
performance problems: currently we can sync. to our mirror network
reasonably quickly. Failing that we'd have to try to pick some subset of
languages: which seems likely to annoy translators a lot - and bust our
attempts to "treat all languages equally" :-)

	Taking just the Win32 build - 140Mb * 100 is 14Gb of data to up-load
and sync. between mirrors: and we do more than Win32 of course :-)

> When LO started the argument against this was that there was no server
> space/bandwidth. I believe there are now enough mirrors, bandwidth...

	The other big issue I'm aware of is having something that can be
quickly built, transferred, signed, up-loaded, distributed etc. Our
build times are already too slow (in my view), without having to pack
and compress one hundred MSI files :-) Of course, experimenting with
that to find some way to incrementally pack/up-load them might help if
you want to experiment with that ?

> Downloading the appropriate language not only saves download time/disk space

	The download for 4.0 is (AFAICS) 184Mb - which is some 21Mb smaller
than the previous release - (for more features :-). So - I'm not sure
that the download time difference is an issue. More importantly - since
it can be distributed to mirrors fast I suspect we have an overall
better download performance in many non-dial-up cases ;-)

	Of course - we still have a lot of fat in there that can be trimmed: a
lot of that got cut out for 4.0 but I expect there is more: if download
size is the issue - then more profiling and work to improve how we do
our translations is prolly the most effective way to help here.

> but also prevents problems such as this
> http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Want-to-install-Libre-in-English-on-a-Chinese-computer-tp4027477.html

	That's a shame indeed. I wonder if there is some good way to address
that problem. Could we add some "install new languages" setup option ?
presumably this is configurable on the command-line and in the setup UI
(?)

> (BTW out of curiosity it is interesting to see the number of downloads per
> OS http://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/files/stable/3.4.1/)

	Not sure how to interpret that :-) We have per-language download
statistics (of varying reliability) if you're interested in that: there
is a clear long-tail effect for minority languages; or was it
per-platform you want ? [the vast majority are Windows of course].

	So - in summary, there is significant cost to this; it may be the right
thing to move to per-language downloads: but if so given the significant
cost of producing them: we'd need to better quantify the benefits of
that: how much of our download size is languages currently ? how many
people need the off-line help that don't have it (that's rather harder
to know), and so on. Having someone working on that would be great.

	Thanks !

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot