Stefan Taxhet's Weblog

Another Release without Mail?

As Pavel pointed out it seemed that we would have to prepare another release without mail. The site suffered from the recent W32.Sober worm. Messages to mailing lists were delivered with a delay of a day or more.

The question how Reply-To headers should be handled by mailing lists seems to be discussed controversially. There are articles why reply-to mangling is useful or harmful. I think those subscribed to the lists can perfectly life with the current setting of OOo lists. I understand those that are not, but this topic shouldn't lead to such an interruption in communication as the mail delay does.

And Martin updated the OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 Release Plan. You will read it on the releases@ooo list in about 8 hours. :-(

Posted at 04:30PM Nov 24, 2005 by Stefan Taxhet in OpenOffice.org  |  Kommentare[1]

Localization help needed for OpenOffice.org 2.0.1

It took some time to finalize OpenOffice.org 2.0 we released in October for several platforms and large number of languages at almost the same time. Now the planning for a new major release is ongoing. But in the meantime we continiously fix bugs and also introduce new features in micro releases (2.0.1, 2.0.2, ...). But this appreciated change in the handling of stable codelines faces us with the problem to keep the localizations in sync.

The highlevel release plan for 2.0.1 says that the deadline for fixes was on November 10th. If we look at the more detailed plan maintained in our new wiki, we see that a release candidate for 2.0.1 is overdue.

Some strings are not translated and unfortunately they are very visible in the insert menu. Please support the effort to finalize the translation so that we can try to regain the lost time. Many thanks for the Danish, Dutch, French, German translations contributed in hours after the call for help to issue 58172

Posted at 09:45PM Nov 20, 2005 by Stefan Taxhet in OpenOffice.org  |  Kommentare[0]

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Is Here

After the most important feedback of 2 betas and 3 release candidates has been incorporated OpenOffice.org 2.0 is now available.

I would like to thank not only our developers, users, marketeers, ... - all community members - but also appreciate the improvement of the site performance.

During the release preparations the site was moved to a new machine, a farm of site accelerators has been installed and then we felt prepared. But there are quite some mail messages queued and they are delivered now after hours, sometimes days. This is the first time I was involved in a launch with almost no email. I have to thank all who helped to smooth out all the misunderstandings which resulted from messages arriving out of order. I think we convinced some more people that IRC and Instant Messaging (IM) are very helpful communication mechanisms.

Posted at 03:37PM Okt 20, 2005 by Stefan Taxhet in OpenOffice.org  |  Kommentare[1]

OpenOffice.org 2.0 RC3

Tomorrow is the fifth birthday for OpenOffice.org. And it would have been nice to release OpenOffice.org 2.0 at the 13th of October. But in the last minute a serious showstopper (#i55330#) has been brought up. In a discussion on IRC we agreed that this is reason enough to start work on RC3. Fortunately Christian was able to provide a solution quickly. This gives us the chance to integrate a patch for printing of text when UI language is RTL (#i55719#) - thanks Alan. Furthermore two more problems (#i55679#, #i55627#) for the Mac OS X will make it in RC3 - thanks Eric, Heiner, Pavel.
The release will be pushed out for about a week. This allows the mirrors to recover from major releases of other large packages. Additionally the new OpenOffice.org hardware should give the main site some relief.
See the new tentative release plan for details.

Posted at 05:39PM Okt 12, 2005 by Stefan Taxhet in OpenOffice.org  |  Kommentare[2]

Photos from OOoCon 2005

If you are going to publish your photos at flickr please tag them with ooocon2005

Posted at 04:10PM Sep 29, 2005 by Stefan Taxhet in OOoCon  |  Kommentare[0]

OOoCon: Tuesday

The travel to Koper - Capodistria was a bit hectic; we had only a few minutes in Munich to check-in for the plane to Trieste. Isn't the color this airline brand uses horrible? Thanks to Martin we had a perfect shuttle to Koper.

On Tuesday we visited the locations where OOoCon 2005 will be held.

From the tower in the middle of the old town you have a perfect view to the north and south. The buildings are quite close together.

Museum, Theatre, University and Italian Community are in this photo set.

If you visit the tower, don't ring the bell, please.

Posted at 11:31AM Sep 28, 2005 by Stefan Taxhet in OOoCon  |  Kommentare[0]

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta 2, New Issues and OOoCon 2005

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta 2 has been released and there are only a few issues with the target milestone "2.0" left. Now we have to follow the incoming issues closely. Let's cross fingers that users tell us that we are not far away from the first release candidate. Then it would be realistic to release OpenOffice.org 2.0 at OOoCon 2005.

Pavel's New Issues feed is very useful for members of the QA project. It's a good entry point for those working on the review of incoming issues. I'm sure we'll find a place to host it somewhere in the .services.openoffice.org domain.
I would prefer a feed over a mailing list dedicated to notifications for new issues. We should remove the prefix "New - " from issue notification emails to allow the mail client the threading by subject of the initial message with follow-ups.

If there weren't this feeling that all people clicking on issue links are responsible for the degradation in performance we have seen.

Of course we are talking about seconds and not milliseconds.

But this is probably unrelated and was just a forerunner of Beta 2 or the publishing of the programme for OOoCon 2005.
Steven Shelton continued the theme of our splash screen and prepared some banners. This is my favorite. Feel free to use the banner at your site and let people know about OpenOffice.org Conference 2005.

Kudos to Steven.

Posted at 12:14AM Aug 29, 2005 by Stefan Taxhet in OpenOffice.org  | 

SVG Import

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta2 is in preparation and feature freeze was some time ago. At the same time we see great progress on a long-standing feature request. Berhard Haumacher (haui) worked on SVG Import for OpenOffice.org. This is on of the most wanted (voted) issue in our bugtracking system IssueTracker.

The converter from Scalable Vector Format (SVG) to OpenDocument Format is implemented as an UNO component. It accomplishes the SVG to OpenDocument translation using services from the Apache Batik SVG Toolkit. After the easy installation you are able to open SVG graphics as Draw files. During import the SVG graphic is translated into OpenDocument graphics primitives that can be displayed and edited with OpenOffice.org Draw.

Bernhard prepared valuable information about requirements, installation, bugs and features of the SVG Import component similar to OOo specifications. The zip file is available for download and test from there too. He initiated the technical discussion at the developer's list of the graphics project and invites you to participate.

Kudos to Bernhard.

If you know of other striking work on OpenOffice.org, please let me know.

Posted at 05:22PM Aug 16, 2005 by Stefan Taxhet in OpenOffice.org  | 

Back from OSCON

I was happy to attend OSCON 2005 after 2 years of absence. Many thanks to Eric for looking after the Sun booth and to Matthew and Adam for their presentation of OpenOffice.org in the booth theater. Given the short lead time the talks and the OOo BoF went quite well.

You will know what many visitors asked: "When will OpenOffice.org 2.0 be final?"
The first quick answer is "it's ready when it's ready". But I'm not convinced that this is how open-source software development works - especially not for large projects like OpenOffice.org. So we have a closer look at timed release cycles for future versions. But I think it's too early to discuss whether we should see a release every 6 or 12 month. A change from a feature driven to a time driven model needs some more preparation.

For OpenOffice.org 2.0 there is some work to do though. Despite the chitchat about a delay for OpenOffice.org due to a "StarOffice marketing decision" we should care about the remaining steps to finalize and launch OpenOffice.org 2.0. Let's support those who help to iron out the remaining issues, keep track of the status or prepare a second beta.
Instead of annoyance OpenOffice.org could use participation in several areas. This is includes the QA project which welcomes every member giving a hand to the issue review or the OpenOffice.org marketing project which needs to update the available material to 2.0.

A reasonable idea came up during the discussions about the OpenOffice.org Conference 2005.
Wouldn't OOoCon be the perfect time and place to throw a release party?

Posted at 08:39AM Aug 08, 2005 by Stefan Taxhet in OpenOffice.org  |