[Libreoffice] minutes of tech. steering call ...

[Michael Meeks]

Present:
	+ Norbert, David, Stephan, Cedric, Thorsten,
	  Andras, Bjoern, Rainer, Michael, Kohei, Caolan

+ Completed Action Items
        + get Bjoern setup with a vhost for gerrit (Thorsten / Christian)
		+ playground already constructed / public:
		  at https://gerrit-test.libreoffice.org
        + close bug-voting with wontfix + rational (Rainer)
        + in-progress: get bugzilla query wrt. master regressions to Michael (Rainer)
        + check and enable new RTF import in master by default (Cedric)
        + fixup qa list configuration (Thorsten)
	+ send Loic some ideas / design / interface work for bug filing (Michael)

+ Pending Action Items
        + default to TM safe (non-TDF) branding (Thorsten)
        + enable on-line updates for QA for dailies ... (Kendy)
        + write substance of what is needed wrt. the extensions
          & templates announce & send to Florian (Andreas)
        + New extensions website: publish / tdf blog (Florian)
	+ publicise / aggregate our list of ODF proposals / extensions (Thorsten)

* Agenda items
	+ pending action items
	+ Munich hack-fest report / roundup (Thorsten)
		+ hack-fest page achivements:
			http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011#Achievements
		+ wonderful, friendly, social atmosphere
		+ too many people to fit in the room (30+)
		+ several companies represented + Munich Gov't
		+ patches from new contributors, some adding to their
		  existing translating / documentation skills.
		+ great infrastructure provision - icecream / server
		+ some good UI designer <-> hacker interactions
		+ hope for hosting an identical event next year
		+ Many thanks to: The City of Munich + DBI GmbH
	+ bus factor issues wrt. scattered projects ...
		+ concern Fridrich + Kohei hit by a bus & their
		  external projects.
AA:		+ mail details for new repo setup (for libtextcat) to Michael (Caolan)
		+ benefits of controlling review (Kohei)
		+ also of branding & separation (Kohei)
		+ problems of fixing: commit, release, up-load, etc. (Michael)
		+ concern mostly around maintainership handover (Caolan)
AA:		+ give mdds website / commit rights out more diversly (Kohei)
	+ Cor's considerations on release timing
		+ existing schedule is here:
		  http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan#3.5_release
		+ very vague, lots of factors and no data / heuristics (Thorsten)
		+ could try a slushy feature-freeze on master around an
		  earlier release with new features (Norbert)
		+ some new features have good QA coupling with their own
		  builds eg. Jean Baptiste (Cedric)
		+ lots of reasons already provided why next time would be
		  better quality-wise than last time (Michael)
		+ not too late to discuss at the conference and move
		  freeze dates by a week or two (Norbert)
		+ always a trade-off between quality, community fun,
		  pace of development (Michael)
	+ (default) internal gnumake re-hash ... (Michael)
		+ having bootstrap make build is painful (Norbert)
		+ not having it on the default path reduces usage (Michael)
		+ on Linux performance gain not justified (Bjoern)
		+ on Windows - there are big wins - fewer deps (Bjoern)
		+ why not add it for windows-only ? (Bjoern)
		+ have a binary that we just download (Thorsten)
		+ dangers of having a fork of the build-tool (Thorsten)
		+ slow in standard make - fix: get it up-stream (Stephan)
		+ complexity added into the core breaks the idea
		  of having a 'pure' configure / make in future (Norbert)
		+ risk of depending on and maintaining a new custom 'make',
		  combined with concern about continuing to require bootstrap,
		  is more significant than -any- magnitude of developer
		  productivity hit for new developers too unaware / lazy
		  to download custom tools. (Bjoern, Stephan, Norbert)
	+ unreliable vs reliable, slow vs. fast tests (Stephan)
		+ subsequenttests - not ideal, but lots of them
		+ problem: they require a complete LibreOffice install
		+ problem: they connect via UNO => poor error reporting & debugging
		+ some rare / intermittent issues running tests & crashes
		  during shutdown
		+ discovered a number of bugs & regressions cleaning them
		  up so they now run.
		+ plan - to include into tinderboxes; problem if sporadic
		  errors are hit, so run a second time.
		+ is there a risk of hanging ? (Norbert)
			+ much more annoying than crashes => spam mail
		+ no known hanging failures (Stephan)
		+ timeouts telltale sign of underlying brokenness (Thorsten)
		+ first get it into a state where it is reliable (Stephan)
		+ enable slowly per platform - Linux+Solaris, not so crashy
		  Windows rather more random crashes
		+ lots of circular links & during-shutdown crashes fixed (Caolan)
		+ first connect it up, don't have re-tries on failure and then
		  see if it fails (Caolan)
		+ could run and log the results, but not mail people (Bjoern)
		+ should: re-consider as/when tinderboxes are ready; let
		  tinderbox users decided whether to run them (Consensus)
	+ Release mgmt (Petr)
		+ concern wrt. bugs in master - need some focus there
		+ no more releases until after the conference
	+ QA update (Rainer)
		+ daily builds for windows - much appreciated & very useful
		+ master in v. good shape currently modulo a few annoying bugs
			+ eg. PDF export from writer completely broken
		+ monthly bug hunting session last week:
			+ not so successful
		+ Loic doing great work on bugzilla assistant / flow
			+ agreed on new design / draft.
			+ lots of help-texts needed
			+ require a "report a bug" item in the help menu
			  as/when it is ready.
	+ proto. conference schedule feedback (Michael)
		+ requests for hack-fest / space - but no time ?
		+ some conflicts & one potential talk merge.

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