Better collaboration

[Pierre Vacher]

I am talking about collaboration in the sense of mutual support.

> I don't see what the value is in highlighting this mishap and it's unfair
> to basically shame people about a backporting omission that happened two
> years ago.

I'm not accusing anyone, I'm reporting the facts, and I've never complained
about having to wait six months for these new features. An oversight can
happen to anyone...

> What I see as unhealthy is your comments to a code reviewer in patch
181159 after a security
> vulnerability was noticed...

This is a very abbreviated reading of patch 181159, because unfortunately
my fix required implementation in a dead portion of LibreOffice code. I
spent a lot of time detecting it and was unable to make my reviewers
understand it. Curiously, this was never acknowledged but was subsequently
corrected. See:

- Avoid exception when reading nil NetAccess value
<https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/183268>
- configmgr: Let XRegistryKey::getLongValue return boolean values, too
<https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/183269>

This time, we can attribute this not to an oversight but rather to a
misunderstanding. In any case, in the end I found myself all alone and
really felt like I had wasted my time. So yes, I may have gotten a little
carried away, and I apologize to the person concerned and apparently they
don't hold it against me and I thank them for that. :-)

I also want to clarify that I have never insulted a reviewer.

So far, I'm willing to believe it was just bad luck (an oversight, a
misunderstanding) that prevented me from being very efficient in publishing
my improvements and you from giving me the support I was hoping for.
Because as far as I'm concerned I can't do better, I'm already at full
capacity.
By the way, if you really want to collaborate, please backport Java
instrumentation support to LibreOffice 25.2. I'm really the only user of it.
see: TDF#167071 <https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=167071>
.



Le mer. 18 juin 2025 à 15:40, Noel Grandin <noelgrandin at gmail.com> a écrit :

> Hi
>
> I'm sorry you found it hard. LibreOffice is a pretty tough place to get
> significant changes deployed.
>
> But don't give up, you're doing great! You already managed to land two
> patches in pretty tricky areas, places most people fear to tread :-)
>
> > I'm asking you for exactly the same thing: please give me a little
> space... and give me a mentor...
>
> Sure, we're happy to help. But some times, there are bigger things at
> play. Release cycles are longer and tougher for a project this size.
>
> Alas, a lot of your hacking is in places that have very (or none) people
> that can help.
>
> And this is a volunteer organisation, there is no large company behind it
> that can "allocate anyone" to you.
>
> But if you hang out on IRC, people are generally wlling to answer any
> questions (assuming someone is around who knows the answer, that is not
> always the case in a project this size).
>
> Hope this helps, and keep up the good work.
>
>
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