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

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@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot