[Libreoffice] Comments on RC1

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Sophie & Wols,

On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 20:57 +0300, Sophie Gautier wrote:
> Like some other members of the L10n project, I'm not very happy with the 
> RC1 we provided:

	:-)

> - the Windows multilanguage installer is really a pain when you are on a 
> slow connexion

	It took under five minutes for me to download; 8Mbit, I can imagine it
taking ten times longer on a 1Mbit link, from Madagascar - perhaps you
don't have a mirrorbrain mirror topologically close to you ?

> - once you're done with the version, you realize that you do not get the 
> help files,

	As Rene says, on-line help is coming, and help packs too.

> - no spellchecker is available when a inexistent grammar checker 
> extension is provided, so a poor quality shown and again a new download 
> to get.

	This sounds like a real bug; can you file it in bugzilla and expand on
the problem ? Best to suggest it as a child of the release blocker too
(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31865) I'm having problems
parsing the problem though - we bundle a grammar checker that doesn't
exist ? :-) perhaps this is why the download is so big.

> I think that we shall consider again the package we are providing and 
> its availability/quality.

	Well - we are looking again at how best to re-package it. The 'obvious'
solutions are not very pleasant ones though. So - with only ten
languages (all of my Catalan, Hungarian, .... friends start screaming) -
we can cover some huge proportion of our users, and then it is only the
minority languages that have either a huge download, or separate / split
language-packs.

	On the other hand - now is not a wonderful time to be discovering
this :-) The outline of what was suggested wrt. multi-language installs
has been on the table for several months, and was there in Beta3; RC1 is
not an ideal time to notice these issues.

	And Wols' comments:

On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 19:14 +0000, Wols Lists wrote:
> What about those people who *C*an't use broadband?

	They have all sorts of pain, that can't be fixed. It takes them about
twice as long to download LO as it does to download OO.o (as of now).
 
> Okay, I wouldn't call 2Mb slow

	2Mbit ~= 10 Mb per minute, ~= 35 minutes for 350mb - right ?

> I'm not in favour of us restricting ourselves "for the sake of those
> without broadband", but if we *consider* them, we are likely to end up
> with a better product. You know, bloat bloat bloat ... being efficient
> for the sake of efficiency really *does* have something going for
> it :-)

	You appear to suggest that we delight in adding bloat for its own sake.
While that most certainly may -seem- to be the case based on the result,
it is somewhat offensive to suggest it :-)

	One of the benefits of the combined installer is that we do not require
many gigabytes of duplicated pointlessness on -every- mirror site: as we
duplicate all of the code again and again and again for windows, 90%+ of
which is identical, but each time with ~10Mb of translation / help :-)
That is a nightare to build, copy, sign, up-load and manage.

	Of course, we want to reduce the ultimate download size; and I'm
working on analysing where the extra space came from in the latest
build: we should be sub 300Mb. And yes, there are a -load- of dumb
design decisions (eg. the template translation[1]) that makes us far too
large, but working on the underlying causes to shrink this seems a far
more worthy goal than hacking around it.

	HTH,

		Michael.

[1] - we have ~20Mb of nearly exactly duplicated templates in there
still that requires code fixing ... if you're interested :-)
-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot