Martin Hollmichel's Weblog: Martin Hollmichel's Weblog

There was an interesting posting from Thorsten Bosbach some time ago about setting up a minimal work environment.

In the meantime the configure scripts moved from the subdirectory config_office to the root of the OpenOffice.org source tree, so some minor adoptions need to be done for getting the minimal work environment set up again. Since in subversion there in no chance anymore to have single file under revision control we need to use the "svn export" workaround to get the new top level configure scripts. For a detailed list of files needed to set up the environment please have a look into my script for automating this.

The OpenOffice.org configure script is designed to set up the build environment of all the OpenOffice.org stuff needed for generated to complete product and not all of these settings a currently switchable by the configure script. For Unix, the X11 Development Header (and libraries) still needed to be installed, including such libs as freetype. But if these are available, just the Archive::Zip modules for perl is needed at the moment. For Windows, the situation is worse. There are many prerequisites, e.g. msi tools, macro assembler, platform SDK and many more, which can't be disabled by configure at the moment, so a minimal set up of the build environment is difficult to achieve.

Since the bash now have a new >>& redirection operator, which appends the standard output and standard error to the named file and also the parser now understands `|&' as a synonym for `2>&1 |', which redirects the standard error for a command through a pipe we really should use bash as the default shell to make the "--with-use-shell=bash" switch obsolete.

No surprise, this minimal build environment can't only be used for the testautomation module, but also for all the dictionaries provided as extensions (svn co svn://svn.services.openoffice.org/ooo/trunk/dictionaries; cd dictionaries; build) and the extras modules (example documents and templates).

OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 comes now with a new online update feature which will automagically notifiy the user about new updates.

It is available as own module during the installation

and its settings can be changed via Tools->Options dialog

A few days ago there was a meeting of some OpenOffice.org project leads who agreed on writing more blogs for their projects to get more visibility for their project. I was asked why we want use one more medium to work with on regular basis for communication.

Here's my answer: Please think about how to get best your target audience involved and then choose the appropriate channel which fits the purpose and you are able to deal with.

Think first about your problem you want to solve with your communication and choose the right channel. In our OpenOffice.org world we have to deal with different content we have to communicate and various communication start and end points. Examples for content may be:

• documentation
• announcements
• presentations
• questions and answers

In some of these cases it may be desired to have the possibility to get feedback. Or it may be even required, e.g. if you need some guidance by an experienced developer during a debug session. Examples for communication end points are:

• Individuals
• Employees of a company participating the OOo Project
• Members of an OpenOffice.org Project
• all members of all OpenOffice.org Communities
• OpenOffice.org Users
• the rest of the world
• and many more like managers, committees, etc.

In most case you think of communication on OpenOffice.org you are yourself the communication start point. This is the easy one.

So it might be obvious if you seek advise during your debugging session that you do not choose the channel "TV" but a personal meeting or a phone call. Or the other extreme, if you want to do some advertising to increase the amount of OpenOffice.org users, you will probably do not choose the channel "phone calls" but a "TV Spot". It not too difficult to put a list with good examples together:

• Reference Documentation: -> Web Pages
• Guides and FAQs: -> Wiki
• Proposals and Discussion about them: -> Mail/Newsgroup
• Questions: -> mail/irc
• write something intesting with unclear communication end point: -> blog
• ask for more money: -> personal meeting with your manager
• ... endless list

I often heard that people tend to prefer privat communication instead of doing this in public. They want to have quick confirmation for doing things right and it is much faster to get this in a personal talk than writing a mail and waiting for responses. In many case you will not even get response on mailing lists. I think it is understandable but not the point. But it is not the point, we need to get all stakeholders involved for any issue regarding the specific project. So the primary issue is not that we need to communicate almost all communication on public channels, but to involve all concerned parties. This usually will result that this is somehow done on public channels but the main point is to do this on the right channel.

Our starting point was "why we want to use one more medium (blogs) ?". There was the question how we can attract more developers for participating in the OOo project. One of the answers was that we need to make OOo more interesting in technical aspects. We found that project specific articles might increase the common interest in OOo. Doing this in blogs seems a appropriate way for doing this: You are able to reach not already subscribed people and the effort for doing this via blog is reasonable low.

Further readings: Social Software

Pavel found it first: "Looks like after logging at the issue page, we are now back on that issue page." This will save a lot "go back and reload" key strokes :) (see issue 34822 )