ESC meeting minutes: 2024-06-06

[Eyal Rozenberg]

I have a bunch of comments on the last ESC session, especially
RTL-related stuff but not just that.

On 06/06/2024 17:52, Miklos Vajna wrote:
>          + string / UI freeze in 3 weeks

>    + didn't know if this would be extension vs core (Ilmari)
>    + we have "AI assistant with ChatGPT" on the extension site
>      https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/41988
>    + do you need any "blessing" from TDF?
>      + would like a "letter of support" from devs, to clarify the dev
> community is OK with this

Not a developer, but - if it's an LLM service by a company which is
known to not respect your privacy, to log and mine your interactions,
and even share them with government agencies - it should not get a
blessing from the project or the TDF, in my opinion.

 >      + looking for best-effort mentoring for now.

I would say the above is also a consideration when it comes to
mentoring. We (= TDF trustees and employees) should try to focus mentees
more on technical options which are more in line with the principles of
our project and FOSS in general. That doesn't mean "No ChatGPT", but
definitely not "just ChatGPT and similar"...

 > + intend to use Meta Llama, and add custom model(s) on top of it

... like that :-)


>      + grammar checking sounds similar, not thinking it would be
> controversial as an extension (Caolan)

if it sends your text somewhere unsafe, then it is at least somewhat
controversial. And while in principle a translation service is not
perfectly safe (distribution of words in our documents reveals a lot
about us), it is still not nearly as problematic as full sentences.


 > * Vertical tabpages state (Samuel/Thorsten)

My 2 cents as a user: Since this is not a bug fix but intended as a UI
improvement, I would lean towards holding it back until the kinks have
been worked out, and it's used in (almost?) all relevant dialogs.

>      + RTL/CTL/CJK update (Jonathan)
>          + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161397 -
> Incorrect RTL fallback glyphs
>              + Fixed
>              + in general, think that the default fonts for various
> languages is far from optiomal (Hossein)

Please remember
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150481
where it is suggested we continue Yousuf's initiative from 2018 and set
decent defaults for Arabic and Farsi, like we had successfully done for
Hebrew in https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120207 . I
would imagine that this may also be the situation for other languages.
Do we have someone to consult about the African RTL languages and the
fonts we use for those? I've not yet met anyone who uses them on the RTL
channel or at LibOCon.

 >              + a wiki page documenting the current state would be ideal

You mean, a wiki page about bundled & default fonts, or about
RTL/CTL/CJK support in general?

>              + is that font fallback vs default fonts for new documents?
 > (Cloph)
 >                + already have a list for the defaults,
language-specific>                + at
officecfg/registry/data/org/openoffice/VCL.xcu,
> might do what you need (Caolan)

Everyone note that in additional to fallbacks, there is also the matter
of substitutions, where we are doing very poorly when it comes to
document rendering: We offer no default substitution tables for various
languages' popular non-free fonts!

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120131