Preserving OpenOffice.org (was RE: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums)

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <de...@acm.org>]

Terry,

Nice work!  Your account for maintenance to the PHPBB install is admirable.

No matter how OpenOffice.org becomes hosted under Apache, it looks like the key questions are support for PHP, MediaWiki, and PHPBB.  

I am assuming that the developer-centric aspects can move to apache.org services, although that is not a black-and-white situation and needs deeper understanding, especially when specialized contributors are involved (translators, language-specific QA, help-file authors, etc.).  

I recognize some names on the English moderator list.

It looks like we need a better roadmap and understanding of the resource requirements and interdependencies than what we have at the 50,000 foot level at <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Transition+Planning>.

How would you and others experienced with OpenOffice.org approach that?

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: TerryE [mailto:ooo@ellisons.org.uk] 
Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2011 13:52
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums

On 31/07/11 20:05, Rob Weir wrote:
[ ... ]
> But so far no one has stepped up to migrate the forums or start something new.
Not quite correct.  I have previously discussed my supporting the 
rehoming both the forums and the wiki on Apache infrastructure with you 
and other project members off DL

Migrating this knowledge to another application which does not preserve 
logical data models (viz any other application) would be a project 
beyond the capability of this team.

> On the customizations, are they purely UI, or do we have functional
> patches as well?

See 
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User:TerryE/phpBB3.0.7_Upgrade/Closed_Issues_and_Actions#Forum_Customisation

> Apache has a "menu" of services it makes available to projects,
> including wikis, mailings lists, Subversion repositories, etc. If we
> want to get something added to that "menu", like phpBB, then we need
> volunteers to work with Apache Infrastructure to get it supported.
> This would require a critical mass of admin volunteers able and
> willing to support phpBB.
I agree.  The alternative to getting this support within Apache.org is 
to discard the knowledge in 300,000 posts across the 9 forums.  The user 
community forums would probably explore alternatives if this looked 
likely to happen.  The OOo wiki contains 10,521 content pages and  
11.338 uploaded files.  These form a critical service to the end-user 
community.  Note that the cwiki markup format doesn't support many of 
the MediaWiki specific markups in this content.

Regards
Terry