minutes of ESC call ...

Thu Mar 29 09:46:55 PDT 2012

Present:
	+ Norbert, Andras, Markus, Michael, Will, Rainer, Bjoern,
	  Stephan, Petr, Caolan, Fridrich, Cedric

* Completed Action Items
	+ Hamburg Hackfest
		+ Hamburg Hack-fest mail the developers list (Bjoern)
		+ Hamburg Hack-fest in topic of IRC channel (Bjoern)
	+ annotate RTF bugs with 'rtf_filter' to break-down regressions (Cedric)
	+ Official TDF blog item announcing GSOC required (Fridrich)

* Pending Action Items
	+ [well underway] review and re-close 3.4.x MAB fixed in 3.5.x (Rainer)
        + [ever-pending] extract 64bit build hardware from firewall (Kendy / Admins)
        + rename VCL API to make it GetBeamerFoo & fix (Michael)
        + cost and usefulness of exceptions proposal (Michael)
	+ Hamburg Hackfest
		+ blog some artwork for 'going to the LibreOffice hack-fest' (All)
		  http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Hamburg2012
		+ TDF blog entry publicising the Hamburg hack-fest (Fridrich)
	+ poke RedHat security chappy wrt. keys (Caolan)

* Action Items review

* Release Engineering update (Petr)
        + 3.5.2 status ...
		+ Windows build for rc2 re-spinning & currently up-loading
			+ Win32 downloads disabled until that's done
		+ possibly delayed by mirror synching issues
		+ following 2 weeks no release.
        + 3.4.6 retrospective ...
		+ lots of fixes here from 3.5 re-using the reviews
		+ no issues reported / little interest (?)
	+ 3.6 - release plan ...
		+ feature-freeze is two months away: June 4th
		+ hack like crazies before then !

* GSOC update (Cedric)
	+ 2-3 applications filed so far
	+ some students getting stuck into easy hacks
	+ perhaps a perception problem:
		+ do people get scared of the scale ?
AA:	+ add a bold heading: LibreOffice is easy & fun to hack (Cedric)
	+ how can we make LibreOffice seem less scary now it's less sick ?
		+ answers on a postcard

* Collaboration Hack-fest update (Will Thompson)
	+ various videos on-line eg.
		+ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBsa212X2OE
		+ over enthusiasm in media wrt. ship-ability etc.
	+ telepathy improvements being fed-back to the core code
	+ how far to completion ? (Norbert)
		+ not that much work on the comms side (Will)
		+ chunk of UI work needed (GSOC)
		+ lots of model/view/controller splitting heavy
		  lifting needed in calc (Michael)
		+ hopefully much more incremental work
		+ experimental feature for a while ...
	+ how do we avoid getting out of sync generally ?
		+ how much needs to be done before the number of
		  things that de-sync becomes reasonably small ?
	+ how much of a model/view separation is needed (Fridrich)
		+ not needed as yet - as long as we can intercept
		  model changes (Michael)
	+ calc an easy start for referencing (Michael)
		+ layout nodes have id's to nodes, could re-use
		  those for writer / SwPaM ? (Cedric)
	+ using undo/redo for calc is not ideal (Markus)
		+ great chunks of data are stored, it's not conservative
		+ same for writer (Cedric)
	+ hopefully can use this logging to replace autosave too
		+ save on a given log-size ...
	+ undo/redo is abstracted behind the ScDocFunc interface
		+ can expand undo/redo more.
	+ can we look at / interoperate with other work in this area (Will?)
		+ interesting ideas, real DOM vs. ODF

* exception size stats (Caolan)
	+ likes exceptions, but they are big
	+ trade-off - bigger tables for smaller code ?
	+ new constructors in 3.6 - work on string literals
		+ shouldn't have to throw - small strings
	+ not strings controlled by malicious input (Stephan)
		+ we abort anyway in these cases
AA:	+ drop exception specs from new string constructors (Lubos)
	+ drop from Any / small object allocations as interested

* memory / heap usage prodding (Caolan)
	+ every static object construction
		- don't go adding thousands of these, not necessary
		  and slows startup
		- also chews memory to clean them up.
	+ much of heap is in configmgr
		+ lots of maps ...
		+ is the map problem - or sheer amount of data ?
		+ change from previous to OUStrings from UTF-8
AA:	+ do the string dump magic (Michael)

* Handling obsolete document formats (Rainer)
	+ Word 6.0 export
		+ https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47857
		+ what should we do with it ? (Caolan)
			+ word 6 & 8 are ~the same code
		+ slightly different, shorter ids written
			+ some stuff skip - can't do
		+ no huge gains from removing it, beyond closing
		  out old bugs
AA:	+ Looks like the real bug is in the KDE file picker (Michael)

* QA update (Rainer / Bjoern)
	+ Markus' nice new chart testing
		+ https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47667
		+ license should be MPL/LGPLv3+
		+ prefer docs written specifically to exercise each feature
		+ a very few more complex real-world docs ok.
	+ final status of 3.4 MAB
		+ really examining the remaining bugs, lots of
		  inter-relations / inappropriate re-openings
		+ progress, hopefully another week.
	+ QA volunteer recruiting
		+ selected some of 1000 NEEDINFO bugs, and made
		  some 'easy QA tasks', and planning to reach out
		  to new guys in May with these, unless others want
		  to volunteer for that.
	+ how do people watch bugzilla ? (from Cor)
		+ would queries of new bugs per component in last 3 days help ?
		+ devs seem to like to create queries themselves (Bjoern)
	+ QA meeting highlights:
		+ Litmus tests are imported into Checkbox, done for 3.5
		+ we have QA easy-hacks now
			+ http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Easy_Hacks
			+ blogging / promotion much appreciated
			+ QA a great place for new people to get stuck in.
		+ Caseconductor vs. Litmus
			+ unclear / over-engineered / confusing ?

* 3.5 most annoying bugs ...
	+ 66 open (of 183), older 58/168 57/157 58/153 52/145 49/140 44/132 41/124
	     36%                   35%    36%    37%    36%    35%    33%    33%
	+ https://bugs.freedesktop.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=37361&hide_resolved=1

* 3.5 bugs tagged with 'regression'
	+ 135(+4) bugs open of 432(+22) total

	* Component    count net *
	+ Writer       - 49 (split rtf)
	+ Writer / RTF - 18 (rtf_filter)
	+ Presentation - 15 (+4)
	+ LibreOffice  - 13 (+1)
	+ Drawing      - 10 (+0)
	+ Spreadsheet  - 4  (-6)
	+ Database     - 7  (+0)
	+ Basic        - 2  (+0)

	+ https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=regression%2C%20&keywords_type=allwords&resolution=---&query_format=advanced&product=LibreOffice&list_id=36764

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