Re: [board-discuss] Enable TDF to contribute more code to LibreOffice with in-house developers to address our donors specific needs

Hi Andreas,

Andreas Mantke píše v St 09. 02. 2022 v 19:58 +0100:

> once I read this sentences the first time, I thought I was in a
> different film in 2010. But maybe I didn't understand the situation
> in OOo project at that time.

I may be wrong, it is a long time ago, but from what I remember, the
problem was not the domination per se [though please don't understand
me as supporting domination ;-)], but the unwillingness to communicate
& seek consensus how to improve the situation for contributors.

[This is also why I insist that "community" means the contributors -
the situation was perfectly fine for the users; they were getting their
builds for free & were happy.]

At that time:

* There was the CWS system that was forcing contributors to go through
  a complicated process even for the simplest fixes

    + unless you have found a friendly internal engineer who was kind
      enough to include your patch into their CWS
    + not to mention that the access to CWS was restricted for the
      outside for a long time in the first place

* CVS was a disaster for version control

    + and I've created a working, usable git import

    + yet Mercurial was favored, even though not ready for the
      OOo size
    + so the conversion was postponed and OOo was converted to
      Subversion as a temporary measure
    + then 2 years later converted to Mercurial
        - with a terrible penalty for the non-internal contributors,
          because Mercurial had to download 500MB of metadata for each
          branch [which might be OK'ish these days - but this was
          11 years ago and more]
    + only to be converted to Subversion again [at Apache]
    + and then finally to git

* the localization went through the .sdf files

    + I was not involved in this, so I have only vague memories it was
      a terrible pain for the l10n community

* the build system was a disaster by itself due to build.pl & dmake

    + and worse, the company had a different, internal one
        - so no interest in improving it for the contributors
    + but at least Bjoern has invented the gbuild while being an
      internal engineer, regardless of the internal pushback

        - he's a hero; and I have fond memories of other heroes who
          helped to make the contributing easier
        - still - the general approach of the company was to make
          the contribution hard.

* I'm sure there's more; but luckily I forgot :-)

So if you see any sign of an ecosystem company trying to make
contributing harder (like the above), please do shout - contributing
must be as easy as possible for everybody who wants to contribute!

All the best,
Kendy

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