LibreOffice conference 2012 (day 2)

I’ve started the morning with the easy hacks for non developers talks, which for my opinion lacked some code related tasks that even non developers can do like fixing translation problems in the source (in the English strings), fixing some simple logic bugs which doesn’t require reading complex code (e.g. traversing records and first/last special cases). The other options mentioned in the talk aren’t less important, but I think people shouldn’t be afraid reading/touching the code to some level even with very limited coding skills.

Later I’ve used Rene’s 3.7/master builds for Debian to verify two RTL bugs (fdo#43210, fdo#44925) fixed by the Motah guys from Saudi Arabia. After the verification, I pushed the changes to the 3.6 branch (should appear in 3.6.4).

Katya, which I’ve met in the last conference, told me see watched my talked remotely, and took interest in RTL ui forcing right alignment to non aligned text. While reproducing the bug on her computer we were able to narrow the problem a bit, to be related to the locale and not only to the RTL interface. Till the end of the day she’d identified the problem in the odp file and I hope a fix will be available by tomorrow.

Jan (kendy) had a good progress with fdo#44657 (RTL problem #1). Checking the fix is quite confusing, and we had to use two laptops to understand and compare the right and desired behavior. Hopefully this problem will end soon, which will make coming to the conference worthwhile (as for the RTL status and efforts).

Later I started working on moving the RTL status page from a wiki in Hebrew to the TDF wiki RTL Bugs page in English . By this I hope to get more visibility to the current status, and as a base to collaboration, let others help with RTL more easily.

During one of the breaks I heard Lionel encourages someone to do builds on his own, and I decided that after avoiding this tasks for two years, it’s about time. By the evening I got a build running according to the native build guide in the wiki (which took half the night on my laptop). There are still a few things to learn how to do with this build, but I how to now be more active in testing things without waiting for official Debian builds (which are quite hard when Debian is frozen). Thanks to Lionel for the encouragement.

LibreOffice conference 2012 (day 1)

Most of the day before the conference, and the conference morning spent working and finalizing my RTL status presentation. My apologies to the lecturers whose lectures I attend only physically (sorry, I can’t split my attention too well).

To my disappointment I had very few attendees in the talk, but I can understand the competition, as the other parallel talks were quite interesting. In at least one of them I wished to attend my self (if I could only be in two places in the same time…). Maybe next year we should have less parallel talks (4 tacks is a lot).

To still push some of the RTL issues, I’ve done a private talk over RTL issues for Caolan and Jan (kendy), which was interesting with some feedback. Jan took fdo#44657 on himself, and by the evening he showed me a great improvement in the status of things, so at least there’s horizontal scrolling in Calc with RTL interface.

With the help of Rene, I got master builds for Debian, and would spend the rest of the conference to check some bugs with it.

During the evening dinner and social event I wanted to thank Miklos personally for really improving the RTF support for RTL and Hebrew documents, and he showed me a few of the new stuff he’d done in master/3.7. While working I’ve noticed a few regressions, and I’m glad they were caught early.

Cedric told me that after last years talk, he started to check his features also in RTL interface, which for me was the best feedback on my efforts. Having developers keeping RTL in mind (even only nce in a while) saves a lot of trouble along the road. I would prefer to check and double check features while they’re being created instead of trying to get bugs fixed later on the release process.

Another thing which I enjoyed noticing is the “fresh blood” the GSoC project brings to LibreOffice. I’ve met with Miklos and Eilidh and got impressed with how a successful internship was used as a springboard into a good job. As there almost aren’t any Israelis who take part in GSoC, I’m not used to notice the effect closely.

The event dinner and mingling was very successful for me, I’ve got a chance to talk with old friends and meet some of the new attendees (and even get some technical work done by talking with people)… Thanks again for the organizational team.