Yet Another Great Community Contribution

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Monday, 12 Jan 2009

Yet Another Great Community Contribution

Frank Meies

It is my pleasure to announce the integration of the new overlining feature. I like to thank Martin Whitaker for his outstanding work on this. Let's have a look at what Martin did to get this feature done. First, he submitted a draft patch that implements this feature.

Just to give you an impression about the extend of code that had to be written or adjusted, this is the list of modules that were affected by the patch: vcl, svx, cppcanvas, drawinglayer, filter, officecfg, sfx2, svtools, reportdesign, chart2, sc, sd, sw, xmloff. Of course we need a specification for all new features. So Martin set up an I-Team consisting of Stefan Baltzer (QA), Uwe Fischer (Documentation) and Frank Loehmann (UX) and wrote this specification. But there was still some way to go: Since this new feature had to be added to ODF, Martin wrote a proposal email to the ODF office-comment mailing list. This proposal was discussed in the ODF TC and accepted to be added to ODF 1.2. Now it was time to finalize the cws. After a review of the code, the cws was built, handed over to Stefan for testing, and eventually integrated into DEV300m39. To sum this up: If you consider the amount and the quality of Martin's contribution, this definitely is a fantastic example of what is possible in an open source project.

tags: development openoffice.org writer

Posted by Frank Meies on 12 Jan 2009 | PermaLink |

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Comments

Someone said:

It sounds more like a fantastic an example of what a bloated piece of junk OO.o has become, if all that code had to be changed just to add a simple feature.

Posted by 212.2.181.196 on January 13, 2009 at 01:42 AM CET #

Someone said:

Just guessing ...

officecfg:
Compatibility switches

vcl, cppcanvas, drawinglayer:
implementation of overline drawing (the hard stuff)

sfx2, svx, svtools:
legacy code, helpers

reportdesign, chart2, sc, sd, sw:
applications using the new feature

filter, xmloff:
Fileformat exports/imports

I dont think its a bad sign that this patch touches so many modules. Acutally it would be a bad sign, if such a "global" feature would only change a more limited set of modules (because it would hint at a hack).

Posted by 213.39.210.209 on January 13, 2009 at 02:10 AM CET #

GB said:

That's great. But what about focusing on fixing basic problems. For example, using 3.0 on the Mac, if I open up a word document and then try to change items in an embedded spreadsheet of the converted document and then try to save the open office writer document, it says it cannot as it is read only. That's pretty basic in MS world. NeoOffice 2.5 does not have this problem. Have posted this bug, but nobody seems to care.

Posted by GB on January 13, 2009 at 02:18 AM CET #

fme said:

GB, thank you for your comment. As you might have noticed, this is an 'external' contribution, i.e., there was a OOo user (just like you) who was unhappy with OOo in its current state. So he sat down and worked on this and once his work was finished, his contribution was accepted for integration a) because this is a useful feature with quite some votes and b) because of the quality of his work. So if you feel that your feature request or bug report is not given the priority that it deserves, you can either follow Martin's example or you can use the provided mailing lists to make your issue more visible.

Posted by fme on January 13, 2009 at 08:25 AM CET #

es said:

@FME: as I read you announcement I indeed felt the same: "Great! A feature nobody needs but takes resources!".

But that was a bad-minded 2sec reaction I could control ;)

So I read further and found the Spec.
http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/formatting/Overlined_Text.odt

In the Spec I found the issue ID
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5991

In the Issue I found the NEEDS: mainly papers about electronic and linguistic.

Well it may not concern 20% (even not 5%?) of OOo users but those who needed it have known to make their way through the IssueTracker and through the years.

They voted and have been patient until one of them decided to *do* it and to get things roll!

Indeed it's a great story but I still think you should have mention *why* we started to implement it. Not only because someone was ready to do it but at first because there was a NEED about it.

Also the Spec lakes of justification.

I think we can learn about it and stress more WHY we are doing things sometimes in order to avoid such reactions (GB's comment)... ;)

my2cts

Posted by es on January 13, 2009 at 06:00 PM CET #

1234 said:

This just unnecessarily complicates the user interface. I guess there are maybe 5 users max who will use this. All others will be annoyed by the added choices.

Please don't integrate this nonsense (sorry Martin).

Posted by 1234 on January 14, 2009 at 09:57 AM CET #

es said:

Instead of shouting at loud, you may have a look at the issue.
36 votes (not a record but it shows a need and an interest) with JUSTIFICATIONS!
"Annoyed" by what? A list box more? There applies the old rule: "If you don't need it don't use it!"

Posted by es on January 14, 2009 at 02:41 PM CET #

lamarcbr said:

Nice contribution in terms of process. How about giving some attention to [Issue 19291] "Split Windows for single document" with 149 votes. If only I could code at that level!

Posted by lamarcbr on January 15, 2009 at 06:26 PM CET #

Someone said:

@lamarcbr: maybe but wrong place to make a call for it, just like GB did.
Push what you want and need by voting and giving accurate statemnts in the issue.

Plus, keep this in mind...
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/why_all_issues_are_equal

Posted by 84.142.191.206 on January 19, 2009 at 12:48 AM CET #