Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #16

Development Meeting Minutes
1

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #16

Date: Mar 11, 2021

Next meeting: Mar 18, 2021

All minutes published on: https://forum.collaboraonline.com/c/news/meeting-minutes/14

Attendees:

  • Muhammet, Andras, Szymon, Gabriel Masei, Gökay, Pranam, Pedro, Nicolas Christener, Michael Meeks, Aron, Ezinne, Thorsten, Kendy

Community update (Muhammet)

  • 85+ new contributors (25+ code contributors) since the move to github

  • Roundup #11 scheduled for the weekend

  • Roundups also shared on our http://dev.to/ profile.

  • Blog posts are much appreciated

    • Help us credit/thank you. :slight_smile:

Template Contest (Nicolas)

  • Template winners, template blog post, further work

  • Heiko having a follow-on series of blogs around creating templates (Pedro)

    • three posts that cover the basics of templates.

    • And alerts people to things you should generally avoid.

    • Hopefully helps to get better templates in future (Nicolas)

  • Plan to run a 2nd contest later in the year again.

  • Localized templates – needed at TDF …

    • Miklos added this to the next round of tasks in the wiki (Michael)

      • po extraction & merging.

Maybe a “connection indicator” would make sense in Cool? (Nicolas)

  • On one COOL instance, tiled rendering was very slow – perhaps server under heavy load

    • Users have no idea why / what the reason is.

  • Jitsi can tell you when your connection is slow – rendering or saving / of file etc.

    • Saving → currently synchrous with no feedback for WOPI save (Michael)

      • this can be really slow even between two machines next to each other

      • async save should fix this.

      • Good idea – lets wait for the async-save to land & get shipped.

      • Can prioritize ping/pong and time that to give some indication.

JSON Toolbar / Notebookbar changes (Szymon)

  • Stuck still.

Bind Mounting / Hard-linking (Gabriel)

  • Sent another patch – up-loaded two of them

    • took a look at 1st, waiting for feedback on the 2nd.

  • Looking into changing the name of the original folder creates some issues

    • Kit doesn’t start afterwards.

  • Now doing it by measuring copy time / cost … a proposal.

    • Looking forward to feedback.

    • Perhaps some cases when the hardlink is slower; copy + hard-link.

  • Will review (Michael)

    • generally nervous about timing.

    • Can’t we stat and see what FS-type is ?

Cleanup lost children (Gabriel)

  • thought it wouldn’t be so useful when we discussed

  • a crucial mechanism for 1&1

  • when converting files – that convert-to option

  • cases when processes are de-coupled from loolwsd – and they hang

  • a few of these can jeopardize the entire pod.

  • Ash has some fixes in this area (Michael)

    • spinning 100% CPU when getting popup dialogs during load

      • it was a dialog, that couldn’t quit etc.

    • Ash’ has a patch to kill these much harder in loolwsd

      • “wsd: terminate Kit when disconnected while loading”

  • Seen the behavior in the editor – generated by a bug in doc loading in core

    • could be in future other cases that can trigger this.

  • Patch is a check in Admin – checks for resource consumption

  • Cleanup-lost-children: checks system for kit processes …

    • compares those with the internal structures – doc-broker list, new children list

    • if not found → gives the kit 2 minutes, if not – kills it.

    • Lets get a patch in (Michael)

      • and add a configure option for this.

      • Not eager for an assassin feature =)

CanvasTileLayer bits (Gokay)

  • CanvasTileLayer now merged to co-6-4 and cp-6.4

  • Fixing bugs, working on scrollbar issues; slow in Firefox just now

    • continues moving after scrolling.

    • After fixing, will merge.

  • Whole lot of little nits, testing much appreciated.

Icon theming (css class names) (Pedro)

  • We have to do server side variable/color substitution → which is easy enough.

    • Needs resourcing.

Async Saving (Kendy)

  • Still taking time, lots of things before we can enable it.

  • Biggest blocker – doing testing correctly, ServerSocket code

    • used to be an external echo service for unit tests

    • Poco’s websocket code has problems with multiple websocket messages per frame

    • Lots of inter-dependencies.

  • Potentially nice performance & bandwidth win from batching bigger messages (Michael)

    • but need the tests not to use busted Poco websocket first.

Release schedule bits (Andras)

  • Originally wanted to release CODE this week, but lots of changes went into 6.4

    • we’re slipping to next-week

    • in generally in a very good state – but want to be even better

  • Other huge changes – impl. of comments on mobile changed completely, VBA, Draw – connectors, adding Draw as a component, custom shapes; Gabriel’s UI config work.

    • lots to test & bang on.

  • Canvas change was in Calc already ? (Nicolas)

    • not for mobile – but now it is (Michael)

      • Will not be updating mobile apps to use this yet.

    • Biggest achievement from user POV (Kendy)

      • split-panes on calc in mobile devices too.

      • Also works better with strange browser settings
        avoiding occasional tile lines / interpolation

Next Meeting

Next meeting will take place on Thursday, Mar 18, 2021 at 11:00 am (UTC)