ESC face-to-face meeting in Hamburg
Here are my notes from the first day of our two-day ESC meeting in
Hamburg, Germany.
I wake up unusally early, took my computer and together with my wife
and son, we went to the airport. I already had a boarding pass because
our national airlines are experimenting with Internet check-in. Later
I realized they are really experimenting with it, because the printed
3D code was not readable by the readers they had at the gate thus they
had to re-type the boarding pass number with an excuse that their
readers do not support this code at all 8) Interesting...
The flight itself was OK, the weather in Prague was cold and
unfriendly, thus I was not surprised by clouds, fog and rain in
Hamburg. Due to the traffic in Hamburg, I was 5 minutes late. Only
five minutes. Michael Meeks arrived at Luebeck, thus he was even more
late.
The meeting started with objectives and expected outcome. The first
presentation was held by Nils F. from Sun about Sun's requirements for
the development and development infrastructure. More or less known
things, with the exception of "64bits clean code is a priority by
definition" and the plans of bundling product based on OpenOffice.org
(or directly OpenOffice.org ?!) with Solaris.
Doko's presentation about Ubuntu requirements was also
interesting. They do provide several new menu items like "Translate"
and "Report an issue". To be able to provide updated translations,
they do have OOo sources twice in their source code. Once for the OOo
and the second instance is used for building resources 8) They have a
requirement that parallel builds should work without hackery
around. This is also my requirement, because on the fast machine I use
for building now, I had to spend a lot of time to simply make it work
directly from the milestones.
Another interesting thing was the
issue
#i81913#
they have created to be able to communicate their problems their users
have with OOo. Interesting approach to communicate to the
upstream. Good.
Michael's and Redflag presentations. The interesting requirement from
Redflag is that OOo works OK for traditional and simplified
Chinese. Hope we will cooperate on this ;-)
In the break, I was almost lost on my way to find Ivo's office. Greet
all the brave guys from RE (met with Oliver for the first time, IIRC)
and then we were talking (for a few moments only, unfortunately) with
Ivo about the future (or end?) of localize.sdf files ;-) At the end, I
relized that Ivo has everything finished and is waiting for Ause's
free time slot ;-)
The next part was about sorting all requirements and having them
written down in the spreadsheet. Lot of fun with it ;-)
But the most interesting part was about prioritizing these
requirements.
Interesting quote from mba: "Q: Who decides what is a no-brainer? A:
It depends on the brain..." ;-)
Late dinner in the local brewery. I was so tired that I left very
early and went to the city to see the enlightened town hall and
despite the first idea to walk to the hotel, I took taxi because the
rain was quite dense.
The hotel Mercure is impressive and very close to Sun offices. Very
good choice. Thank you Sabine. ;-)