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

[Thorsten Behrens]

Hi Björn,

Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> 1/ We unpublish all API
>
Ok so far -

> 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.
>
This is where the plan breaks already.

To relay some stories from real life - there's _so_ much integration
with especially OpenOffice out there, coming from legacy systems, tons
of macro-ized applications, sometimes bespoke development with the
company simply selling, not developing anymore - that by the time
those deployments 'see' our unpublished API (and subsequent changes
thereof), it's gonna be much, much, much too late to do anything about
it.

Those people will then simply walk away.

The idea that we could somehow entice a sizeable chunk of our API
consumers to be part of our community is a pipe dream. Like it or not,
with taking over market share from OpenOffice we inherited that API
promise, and I'd really prefer to continue serving that market
segment.

I mean, Linux has not been exactly timid in changing implementation
quite rapidly, still they managed to keep the userland API reasonably
stable. Why can't we? Except for the repulsiveness of XFoo2, XFoo3,
and some extra day of hacking here or there - did this really hold us
back so far?

> 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.
> 
Orthogonally to the above, that's a really worthwhile idea. I was once
already kicking the idea of an API forum / mailing list / whatever
around; perhaps -- if properly seeded & tended -- the dev askbot
instance could be that?

Cheers,

-- Thorsten
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