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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