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

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Bjoern,

On 16/12/16 12:11, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> Maybe we should change the meaning of "published" then? Currently, "published"
> means a onesided promise to each and eevery person on this planet -- people that we have
> no relation with at all -- that we will never ever change this API and we dont
> ever get anything in return.

	Fair enough.

> 1/ We unpublish all API
> 2/ We give UNO user an opportunity to ask for republishing specific parts of
>    the API, when they provide a reasonable use case and promise to be the
>    "client steward" for these.

	Sounds sensible to me; ideally with unit tests etc. FWIW - I'd suggest
that much of the udkapi can remain published though.

> 3/ We continue to change unpublished API as core developers see reasonable. We
>    promise to release changes to these newly republished APIs only after
>    checking back with the "client steward" for that part of the UNO API for
>    advisory _non-blocking_ input[1].

	I like a mapping of real people to bits of API. Particularly if we
focus just on those bindings that have real problems with extension
(currently) - like Java, C++ etc.

> I see multiple advantages to this:
> 
> - we (core devs) still retain the perogatibve to do the ultimate decisions on
>   UNO API changes

	You know - I still really like having some area where people can work
without asking someone; I think having an "ultimate decision making
authority" that is frequently wielded when necessary is a net negative
in general =) It is also just generally a social ill to have to have
guardians watching left & right and jumping on people - the less we can
do of that the better.

> There might be some hope that UNO API users like WollMux, Mendeley, Zotero
> might be interested in this -- and by talking to them instead of with
> $ANONYMOUS_GUY_ON_THE_INTERTUBES we might get a sensible feedback channel and
> bring out ecosystem closer together -- as they have incentives to join this
> discussion.

	I would love some reliable way whereby: without asking them we can get
a dump of all the interfaces they use =) I'm well up for making eg. our
external C++ bindings less efficient - if we win that =) IMHO making
good, data-driven decisions, and even better relational decisions [ we
can go talk to the one user of foo Interface ;-] is -far- more useful,
the Mono guys had a tool to help with this. I love your idea of getting
the extension guys closer to us and getting some database of people who
care about interfaces.

	ATB,

		Michael.

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