Bounty for auto table layout?

[Jens Bannmann <je...@web.de>]

Hi there,

I'm really interested in having auto table layout implemented in FOP. 
Bug 40271 has a patch, but for nearly eight months there was no 
activity. So I thought that perhaps a fund/bounty might motivate a 
developer to implement this feature. As I use FOP only for 
non-commercial purposes, my own share wouldn't be enourmous (surely 
below 100 USD), but I hope others would join the effort to make the sum 
interesting.

What do you all think? Is this a viable option, i.e. would it be 
accepted within the project? Was something like that done before at FOP 
or Apache in general? How could this be organized?

Best regards,
Jens

Re: Bounty for auto table layout?

[Andreas L Delmelle <a_...@pandora.be>]

On Jul 22, 2007, at 09:31, Jens Bannmann wrote:

>
> Andreas L Demelle wrote:
>> I do wonder whether the motivation (with or without the bounty) is  
>> enough by itself to make it happen. (...) I'm under the impression  
>> that certain other things need to happen first before a decent  
>> auto-layout implementation becomes a feasible project...
>
> Could you elaborate on that a bit? Without knowing any implementation
> details, I think that all related work would be (implicitly or
> explicitly) included in the funded task and as such done by the  
> developer.

Indeed, that was what I meant to caution about. An initial estimation  
of the work involved would, at the current moment, lead to a much  
higher 'cost', where in the end the auto-table-layout implementation  
itself would represent only a minimal part of the whole effort.

That said, it could definitely work. As you see, the interest is  
already rising.


Cheers

Andreas

Re: Bounty for auto table layout?

[Andreas L Delmelle <a_...@pandora.be>]

On Jul 23, 2007, at 16:13, Vincent Hennebert wrote:

>>
>> Could you elaborate on that a bit? Without knowing any implementation
>> details, I think that all related work would be (implicitly or
>> explicitly) included in the funded task and as such done by the  
>> developer.
>
> Well I would be curious too ;-) Right now I can't think of anything  
> that
> would "prevent" or impede the development of this feature? Although
> there are probably some (many) other missing preliminary things.

Prevent? No, indeed not. Impede...
Well, have either of you actually /read/ the entire story in the  
Bugzilla 40271? :)


It's not so much impediment, as an increase in the work involved.

Note that, for instance, solving the issue of varying page-ipd (or  
even merely separating the concern of the initial generation of the  
element lists), would already get us an awful lot closer. Right now,  
it is almost impossible to get to the content-widths of the FOs in  
the table, without already going through the whole line-breaking loop...


Cheers

Andreas

Re: Bounty for auto table layout?

[Vincent Hennebert <vi...@anyware-tech.com>]

Hi Jens,

Jens Bannmann a écrit :
> Vincent Hennebert wrote:
>> Question is, also, how to advertise the thing. Would the fop-user
>> mailing list be enough to attract donators?
> 
> From a quick search, it doesn't seem that the topic was brought up
> previously on that list. Can anyone think of another place where we can
> reach users? I think docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org might help, too -
> although it's not fop-specific, the DocBook user community is surely
> interested in improving their open source toolchain.

Yes, probably. Given the mostly professional audience there they should
be ok with such an action; all the more if a simple user makes the
proposal and not a FOP developer.


> Andreas L Demelle wrote:
>> I do wonder whether the motivation (with or without the bounty) is
>> enough by itself to make it happen. (...) I'm under the impression
>> that certain other things need to happen first before a decent
>> auto-layout implementation becomes a feasible project...
> 
> Could you elaborate on that a bit? Without knowing any implementation
> details, I think that all related work would be (implicitly or
> explicitly) included in the funded task and as such done by the developer.

Well I would be curious too ;-) Right now I can't think of anything that
would "prevent" or impede the development of this feature? Although
there are probably some (many) other missing preliminary things.


<snip/>
> Vincent, you also indicated interest. What's the required time/bounty
> for you?

Frankly, I can't tell it right now. I would first have to spend some
time studying this part of the code. I'll try and find some time to do
that ASAP.


> I'm pretty convinced that handling this via fundable.org is the way to
> go. The service has been around since 2005 and looks trustworthy. They
> accept payments via PayPal, but only actually charge when the pre-set
> funding goal of a "group action" is met.

Well, this seems ok.


> What we need to decide on is
> 
> a) What is the funding goal (fixed dollar amount)? If it's not met, no
> money is collected, so polls are really needed to get an idea of the
> support base. (Note: fundable.org charges 7% of the goal on success, but
> I think that's fair enough for their service)

Ideally it would cover the whole needed time, to guarantee that the
feature will be available on time. However, if only a few days of
development are missing that would still make it I guess. The rest could
be done in the free time. That should be at the discretion of the chosen
developer of course ;-)


> b) What will be the group action's deadline? I propose two months from
> the day the group action starts. That increases the chance to be
> noticed; if the goal is met before, the group action immediately ends
> anyway.

Well, if companies want to participate they would probably need some
time to prepare a budget for that. That said, I don't think more than 3
months is reasonable, otherwise the interest will vanish.


> c) Who will be "group leader" of this over at fundable? This person gets
> the money, so it should be someone people trust, i.e. has a background
> with the project etc. (e.g. not me ;-) Ideally, it would be the
> developer, but it could be someone else who passes on the money. (btw:
> the latter would also allow several developers - working parallel or in
> sequence - among which the group leader distributes the money in some
> fair way.)

I'd say someone from the project who is not the developer himself.

Regards,
Vincent

Re: Bounty for auto table layout?

[Jens Bannmann <je...@web.de>]

Vincent Hennebert wrote:
> Question is, also, how to advertise the thing. Would the fop-user 
> mailing list be enough to attract donators?

 From a quick search, it doesn't seem that the topic was brought up
previously on that list. Can anyone think of another place where we can
reach users? I think docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org might help, too -
although it's not fop-specific, the DocBook user community is surely
interested in improving their open source toolchain.

Andreas L Demelle wrote:
> I do wonder whether the motivation (with or without the bounty) is 
> enough by itself to make it happen. (...) I'm under the impression 
> that certain other things need to happen first before a decent 
> auto-layout implementation becomes a feasible project...

Could you elaborate on that a bit? Without knowing any implementation
details, I think that all related work would be (implicitly or
explicitly) included in the funded task and as such done by the developer.

Patrick Paul wrote:
> I am still motivated in participating in this feature. As you said 
> there are things that need to happen, or at least in my case things 
> that need to be understood before being able to do a decent 
> auto-layout implementation.

Patrick, how much time do you think you would need? Could you, like
Vincent, use your work hours for this if paid - if so, what should the
bounty be?

Vincent, you also indicated interest. What's the required time/bounty
for you?

Is anyone else willing, able and available to do this? If so, include
estimates as above.


I'm pretty convinced that handling this via fundable.org is the way to
go. The service has been around since 2005 and looks trustworthy. They
accept payments via PayPal, but only actually charge when the pre-set
funding goal of a "group action" is met.

What we need to decide on is

a) What is the funding goal (fixed dollar amount)? If it's not met, no
money is collected, so polls are really needed to get an idea of the
support base. (Note: fundable.org charges 7% of the goal on success, but 
I think that's fair enough for their service)

b) What will be the group action's deadline? I propose two months from
the day the group action starts. That increases the chance to be
noticed; if the goal is met before, the group action immediately ends 
anyway.

c) Who will be "group leader" of this over at fundable? This person gets
the money, so it should be someone people trust, i.e. has a background
with the project etc. (e.g. not me ;-) Ideally, it would be the
developer, but it could be someone else who passes on the money. (btw:
the latter would also allow several developers - working parallel or in
sequence - among which the group leader distributes the money in some
fair way.)


So, what do you all think on the above, especially a-c?

Regards,
Jens

Re: Bounty for auto table layout?

[Patrick Paul <pp...@yahoo.ca>]

Andreas L Delmelle wrote:
> On Jul 20, 2007, at 14:08, Andrejus Chaliapinas wrote:
>
> Hi
>
Hi
> Thought I'd chime in on this one as well...
>
> First off: I agree with the general sentiment that this is a very
> interesting initiative!
>
> That said, as a note of caution, I do wonder whether the motivation
> (with or without the bounty) is enough by itself to make it happen.
> I've recently also been looking in the direction of the patch in
> bugzilla 40271, but I'm under the impression that certain other things
> need to happen first before a decent auto-layout implementation
> becomes a feasible project... Not Patrick's fault, --he was
> motivated-- but maybe such an enterprise was too complex to take on as
> a one-man GSoC project. Even if it didn't immediately succeed, it did
> give us a better impression of other changes that could reduce the
> complexity drastically.
I am still motivated in participating in this feature. As you said there
are things that need to happen, or at least in my case things that need
to be understood before being able to do a decent auto-layout
implementation.

I remember the main difficulty I had was to get information (i.e. the
width) up the tree in order to compute the proper width  of each column.
Moreover a mechanism would have to be devised to avoid performing some
operations twice (the first pass to determine the optimal width and the
second one to render the table).
>> (...)
>> Some time ago I've tried to dig a little into those Layouts
>> techniques, but
>> quickly found that it's not the thing I could enhance myself easily
>> (though
>> it was some initial information provided by Jeremias and Simon and maybe
>> others, but still not easy to understand without UML graphs of pieces
>> interaction),
>> so stayed mostly with work on various XSL/XML parts for my
>> projects needs and left those FO things for real experts :).
>
> What helped me a lot in understanding certain parts of the overall
> processing were not necessarily words or graphs, but mainly random
> debug sessions. Stroll through the code, place a few breakpoints in
> the parts of the code that interest you, debug the process, have a
> look at the call stacks, step further to see which other methods are
> called afterwards to get a hang of how the objects and the logic fit
> together, and which methods are called at what point in the process...
> Not perfect, but very educational. :-)
I completely agree. I remember spending hours and hours just figuring
out which methods are called at lower levels of the layout engine and
how the information works its way back up the tree.
>
> Cheers
>
> Andreas
Regards,

Patrick

Re: Bounty for auto table layout?

[Andreas L Delmelle <a_...@pandora.be>]

On Jul 20, 2007, at 14:08, Andrejus Chaliapinas wrote:

Hi

Thought I'd chime in on this one as well...

First off: I agree with the general sentiment that this is a very  
interesting initiative!

That said, as a note of caution, I do wonder whether the motivation  
(with or without the bounty) is enough by itself to make it happen.  
I've recently also been looking in the direction of the patch in  
bugzilla 40271, but I'm under the impression that certain other  
things need to happen first before a decent auto-layout  
implementation becomes a feasible project... Not Patrick's fault, -- 
he was motivated-- but maybe such an enterprise was too complex to  
take on as a one-man GSoC project. Even if it didn't immediately  
succeed, it did give us a better impression of other changes that  
could reduce the complexity drastically.

>> I'm 99.9% sure that it would not. There were discussions about  
>> that in
>> the past and the members' opinion was to keep such things separate  
>> from
>> the ASF. The ASF would never pay anyone to make an improvement on  
>> one of
>> the projects since it's a NPO and there are certain rules around that
>> status.
>>
>
> That's true, we have a guard of great volunteers for such projects,  
> who
> don't expect to be paid for their job. Though on other side I'd be  
> very
> interested if such so needed enhancement could be done more quickly  
> (i.e.
> not related on someone afterhours unsleeping nights).
>
> Some time ago I've tried to dig a little into those Layouts  
> techniques, but
> quickly found that it's not the thing I could enhance myself easily  
> (though
> it was some initial information provided by Jeremias and Simon and  
> maybe
> others, but still not easy to understand without UML graphs of pieces
> interaction),
> so stayed mostly with work on various XSL/XML parts for my
> projects needs and left those FO things for real experts :).

What helped me a lot in understanding certain parts of the overall  
processing were not necessarily words or graphs, but mainly random  
debug sessions. Stroll through the code, place a few breakpoints in  
the parts of the code that interest you, debug the process, have a  
look at the call stacks, step further to see which other methods are  
called afterwards to get a hang of how the objects and the logic fit  
together, and which methods are called at what point in the process...
Not perfect, but very educational. :-)



Cheers

Andreas

RE: Bounty for auto table layout?

[Andrejus Chaliapinas <a....@infosana.com>]

> I'm 99.9% sure that it would not. There were discussions about that in
> the past and the members' opinion was to keep such things separate from
> the ASF. The ASF would never pay anyone to make an improvement on one of
> the projects since it's a NPO and there are certain rules around that
> status.
>

That's true, we have a guard of great volunteers for such projects, who
don't expect to be paid for their job. Though on other side I'd be very
interested if such so needed enhancement could be done more quickly (i.e.
not related on someone afterhours unsleeping nights).

Some time ago I've tried to dig a little into those Layouts techniques, but
quickly found that it's not the thing I could enhance myself easily (though
it was some initial information provided by Jeremias and Simon and maybe
others, but still not easy to understand without UML graphs of pieces
interaction), so stayed mostly with work on various XSL/XML parts for my
projects needs and left those FO things for real experts :).

So, for summary, I could also sponsor additional $100 (if anybody care,
Vincent?) to make things happen more quickly, but project status should not
change due to that and such sponsor approach should be only on volunteer
basis as well.

Just some additional thoughts on that.

Regards,
Andrejus

Re: Bounty for auto table layout?

[Jeremias Maerki <de...@jeremias-maerki.ch>]

On 20.07.2007 10:06:55 Vincent Hennebert wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I second that, a good idea for sure!
> 
> Regarding how this may be done within the ASF, that's probably a
> question we can ask on legal-discuss@. Maybe the ASF itself can serve as
> the SPP platform?

I'm 99.9% sure that it would not. There were discussions about that in
the past and the members' opinion was to keep such things separate from
the ASF. The ASF would never pay anyone to make an improvement on one of
the projects since it's a NPO and there are certain rules around that
status.

<snip/>


Jeremias Maerki

Re: Bounty for auto table layout?

[Vincent Hennebert <vi...@anyware-tech.com>]

Hi,

I second that, a good idea for sure!

Regarding how this may be done within the ASF, that's probably a
question we can ask on legal-discuss@. Maybe the ASF itself can serve as
the SPP platform?

I think it's worth making a poll on fop-user to see how many users would
be ready to participate in the funding. Given the number of companies
that are using FOP in their commercial systems, that would be a pity if
there were not enough funders. Question is, also, how to advertise the
thing. Would the fop-user mailing list be enough to attract donators?

I would probably be a candidate for the job. My free time is too sparse
for tackling such a task (pretty much the same case as for
before-floats...), so being able to do that during the work hours would
certainly facilitate things.

Thanks for your proposal, Jens.
Vincent


Jeremias Maerki a écrit :
> Hi Jens
> 
> Good idea, IMO! That's the "street performer protocol" [1]. Let's hope
> there will be enough "motivation" (and time) around for someone.
> 
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Performer_Protocol
> 
> I don't know of an instance inside the ASF where this has been tried,
> but I know this has been done elsewhere. As for the organization, look
> at the links on the WikiPedia page which provides links to pages
> providing "trusted 3rd-party" services. I certainly have absolutely
> nothing about such an approach. But I don't know about what other people
> think. I mean, it can only help FOP, can't it?
> 
> What could help is that someone who considers taking the job does an
> binding estimate so we know the amount that has to be found.
> 
> On 20.07.2007 00:44:25 Jens Bannmann wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I'm really interested in having auto table layout implemented in FOP. 
>> Bug 40271 has a patch, but for nearly eight months there was no 
>> activity. So I thought that perhaps a fund/bounty might motivate a 
>> developer to implement this feature. As I use FOP only for 
>> non-commercial purposes, my own share wouldn't be enourmous (surely 
>> below 100 USD), but I hope others would join the effort to make the sum 
>> interesting.
>>
>> What do you all think? Is this a viable option, i.e. would it be 
>> accepted within the project? Was something like that done before at FOP 
>> or Apache in general? How could this be organized?
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Jens
> 
> 
> 
> Jeremias Maerki
> 

Re: Bounty for auto table layout?

[Jeremias Maerki <de...@jeremias-maerki.ch>]

Hi Jens

Good idea, IMO! That's the "street performer protocol" [1]. Let's hope
there will be enough "motivation" (and time) around for someone.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Performer_Protocol

I don't know of an instance inside the ASF where this has been tried,
but I know this has been done elsewhere. As for the organization, look
at the links on the WikiPedia page which provides links to pages
providing "trusted 3rd-party" services. I certainly have absolutely
nothing about such an approach. But I don't know about what other people
think. I mean, it can only help FOP, can't it?

What could help is that someone who considers taking the job does an
binding estimate so we know the amount that has to be found.

On 20.07.2007 00:44:25 Jens Bannmann wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I'm really interested in having auto table layout implemented in FOP. 
> Bug 40271 has a patch, but for nearly eight months there was no 
> activity. So I thought that perhaps a fund/bounty might motivate a 
> developer to implement this feature. As I use FOP only for 
> non-commercial purposes, my own share wouldn't be enourmous (surely 
> below 100 USD), but I hope others would join the effort to make the sum 
> interesting.
> 
> What do you all think? Is this a viable option, i.e. would it be 
> accepted within the project? Was something like that done before at FOP 
> or Apache in general? How could this be organized?
> 
> Best regards,
> Jens



Jeremias Maerki