Vladislav Stevanovic wrote:
We had in Serbia simmilar problem with one of the most-frequently-used extension in Serbian. Thanks for Jörg Schmidt he made version for AOO 4.0, but we have still some problems here, because old version of this extension is still visible on AOO Extension site! It is silent message for all: this is not working on AOO, but here is on our site.
Indeed, we must do something about this. PDF Import is another excellent example: people do not read that the 4.0-compatible version is available as a different extension and keep complaining and believing that a 4.0-compatible version does not exist... this creates confusion, misunderstandings and a huge waste of time for support.
1) Administrators must have create the rule: extensions on AOO site "Extension" must declared as appropriate or non-appropriate for AOO4.0.
This is already there. There's compatibility information for all releases. And we even have a wiki page
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Extensions/Extensions_and_Apache_OpenOffice_4.0 with examples and information.
2) In future we must made restriction for those extensions on our site
I don't get what you would restrict. Do you mean that you would "hide" all extensions that are not compatible with 4.0? I think they can stay... Maybe it is possible to add a warning to the extensions that do not have releases explicitly compatible with 4.0?
3) There is some the most frequently used extensions. What we can do to ensure that this extension works in AOO 4.0? Can we invited authors of this extensions to made version for AOO4.0? Can we create some fork, if it is totaly legal (for example, for extensions where authors of extensions do not want to make corrections for AOO 4.0 and when licence permit forks?
This is complex and I don't know what is best to do. For sure PDF Import, the most popular extension, the source code for which is in the OpenOffice sources, is unmaintained and "forked" (meaning: Ariel provided a working replacement that is compatible with 4.0), but the replacement is shadowed by the original extension. Same for the MySQL Connector. For those two extensions I would suggest to plug in Ariel's replacements as updates to the original extension, to give them proper visibility.
But these two extensions are very special cases. In general, "forking" will be a mess since it will duplicate extensions and the original one will still be more visible and outdated. "Transfer of ownership" (meaning: the author has no interest or time to update the extension, but at least he is available to transfer the ownership of the extension on the Extensions site to another user who is volunteering to create a 4.0-compatible version) would work best.
Regards, Andrea. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
