Christian,
you just hit a general problem of the specification process
and its
output. The output of this process namely the specifications
which
should serve as a working base for development, testing,
user experience
and documentation are all too often in an unsatisfactory
shape. The
main problems are inclompleteness, ambiguity, inconsistency
to name just
a few. To fix these problems a project has been setup to
address and fix
such problems in the future see "Improving the
Specification Workflow"
earlier in this newsgroup for details. As a first outcome of
this
project an improved specification template has been
introduced. Of
course this is not sufficient to fix all problems already
but its a
first step more steps will follow.
Beside all the technical and process improvements what is
always needed
is motivation and understanding that specifications when
done properly
save us a lot of time. Lessons that we all including the
OpenOffice.org
community member who work at Sun have to learn.
As we all make mistakes the best we can do is to gather
early feedback
and keep learning.
Regards,
Tino
Christian Lohmaier wrote On 04/07/06 16:14,:
> Hi *,
>
> as the subject indicates, this is a rant about the
specification
> process/how it is handled from Sun-side.
>
> I'm refering to
> http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/onlineup
date/Software_Update.odt
> as a recent example, but there are enough older ones
that don't match
> the guidelines.
>
> What I miss is:
> * TaskID
> * How are languages/language packs handled.
>
> Who decides/sets a version as "available",
what if a user has an english
> base version with a french language-pack. What version
is checked in
> this case? What if there's a new english version, but
no french version
> yet? Are language-packs taken into accout at all?
>
> From the AllLanguages mentioned in the spec,
language-packs are
> ignored. (either that or AllLanguages doesn't work as
it should) So a
> user using a hebrew language pack will be offered an
update for the
> english base-version without there being a
corresponding updated
> hebrew-language pack?
>
> Thus important information is missing and thus
questions the sense of
> this spec.
>
> You define the UI in detail, without elaborating on the
> background-problems. Just to add a menu entry you
don't need a spec
> process.
>
> While I do not question the proposed/added feature
itself, it is the
> spec that I don't like. Trying to push the
spec-process within the
> community is not supported by issueing specification
documents that do
> not adhere to the guidelines that the community is
asked to follow.
>
> (Having it formatted by empty paragraphs doesn't
improve the impression
> either)
>
> ciao
> Christian
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