Re: [tdf-discuss] IAccessible2, IBM, Oracle (was: (...) Proposal to join Apache OpenOffice)

Hi Christophe,

        Thanks for your mail.

On Wed, 2011-07-27 at 10:50 +0200, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
> CS: I agree that this is not how open source development should be done.
> My intention was not to defend this but to highlight the importance
> of IAccessible2.

        I appreciate its importance. Indeed, if someone wants to continue the
missing forward-porting / testing piece that Malte was doing to the IBM
CWS (dumped vs. a very old version) - they are most welcome - I'd love
to see the patch in LibreOffice. I'm happy to help review / merge it,
and/or mentor people to get that work done.

        Having said that - there is hope that IBM will finally do the right
thing, and do this work themselves (indeed they've re-re-committed to do
so already for the Apache version), that will make it easier for us to
merge it. This highlights the uncertainty problem plaguing this area: it
is pointless to invest our rather scarce resources into something that
someone else claims they will do soon anyway. So - by saying "we'll do
it" and by then not doing it - the effect is to stop others from doing
it.

> The intention of my original response was to draw attention to
> IAccessible2, which is a valuable contribution in its own right, even
> though you clearly expected more from IBM.

        Sure sure, its valuable. How much work it was we'll see when we see how
much code it is. My suspicion is that it is under 10k LOC of bridge code
(at least the ~equivalent atk binding is much less than that). But sure,
that small piece of code has a very real usefulness and no-one should
debate that.

> CS: If you think it's OK for blind users on Windows to wait another
> two years [1],

        Incidentally, everyone not programming on fixing this problem thinks it
is ok for people to wait. If they "can't program" - that is fine - that
is how most programmers started out, so lets expand it to include
everyone not learning to program.

        Sadly many people seem to pass the time, while waiting, by griping
about the fact that everyone else is just waiting, and no-one is
working / learning how to improve the software for them. The
unacceptable irony of that appears to escape them strangely.

        In a world of very many different priorities, it is necessary to choose
what to do; and working on something for which a duplication of effort
has been promised for years is hard to get excited about I'm afraid.

        All the best,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot


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