Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #33

Development Meeting Minutes
1

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #33

Date: July 15, 2021

Next meeting: July 22, 2021

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

Attendees:

  • Alexandru, Nicolas, Tor, Pranam, Gabriel, Szymon, Muhammet, Michael, Kendy, Andreas K, Kendy, Andras

Community update (Muhammet)

  • Pedro added some more nice easy hacks …

  • Forum: we are getting cool feedback and questions, and even answers from community

    • good to have more questions answered … if people can help out

    • have looked into integrations with Telegram and our forum

      • not sure if it becomes too noisy – but we can get a notification there.

      • Lets try it.

    • Have started going through un-answered topics and answering them.

      • Have started pinging team-mates and appreciate help there.

  • weekly updates ? (Michael)

    • in progress – we have a new welcome bot for new contributors on github repo

      • whenever some new contributor creates ap ull-request

        • they get a welcome message

        • and another when it is 1st merged.

        • Also pings Muhammet – since it mentions him.

      • Invites the new contributor to our communication channels & offers help

Sidebar problem in the call (Szymon)

  • related to conversion to flex containers by Gokay

    • he plans to fix it …

Native sidebars (Szymon)

  • last week – focused on regressions in the mobile wizard

  • fixing the bugs there – not many changes in the desktop sidebar

  • Pedro started to style it so it looks much better

    • some larger pull-requests for that.

  • How large is that ? (Michael)

    • We re-use CSS from dialogs (Szymon)

      • and use the sidebar class – to apply to the new elements.

      • Improved some split lines between container etc.

  • What is left ? (Michael)

    • crash on custom color (Syzmon)

      • not async there – on it.

    • After a crash – sidebar not visible

    • Document container not re-sized to sidebar size (Gokay on it)

      • more testing needed …

    • adding more cypress tests would be good …

Design bits (Andreas K)

  • would like to know if there is something I can do to help.

  • We have pull requests on github for the sidebar (Szymon)

    • will send a link on IRC.

    • When we hover over elements – missing correct selections, 1x pixel offsets etc.

  • Is there a reason on staging – opening the sidebar & toolbar – we have different drop-down menus in style-text-body

    • look completely different to the toolbar; should there be

    • should we have similar backend for toolbar & sidebar ?

    • In general with popups – content of drop-downs can be different (Szymon)

      • are rendered on the server; noticed not having unified styling for toolbar/notebookbar/sidebar

        • sometimes rounded corners – sometimes not.

        • Different ‘selected’ methods

          • would be good to unify / share this styling.

      • Should we have stylign in one css file? (Andreas)

        • good to discuss with Pedro (Szymon)

          • want to define this in one place, not 3x over.

  • Contextual toolbars for mobile UI (Andreas K)

    • tried to find the old pull-request but can’t find it … needs to be re-implemented (Szymon)

    • save-icon is cropped for me (Michael)

  • Tunnelled dialogs? (Michael)

    • all previous dialogs are still tunnelled (Szymon)

      • most of that framework work is complete – shouldn’t be hard

      • but some complex ones – eg. lots of tabs can be harder

        • have to handle the tabs.

      • After finishing the sidebar can move to this.

  • Sidebar (Andreas K)

    • is it planned to have the dialog icons in the sidebar by the separators

    • current JSON doesn’t’ have it (Szymon)

      • need to look at this – don’t know if it’s easy to get that.

      • After welding – has a more complex structure.

Performance / profiling (Tor)

  • Working on improving tracing and profiling to be able to get at performance issues better

  • The automated stress testing framework is being made to work again by Pranam

  • Noticed one bad and trivially reproducible performance issue related to tables in text document. But this was in cp-6.4. Need to check if the same is also in co-2021. Forward-porting stuff from cp-6.4 to co-2021 lead to failing unit tests, trying to fix those.

  • But actually cp-6.4 is more important, will go back to that

CI stability (Andras)

Stability (Gabriel)

  • was working for the previous week on internal things

  • put a few days into ASAN – and have some issues – on online it works nicely

    • need it inside core – trying to build both with ASAN activated

    • didn’t mange to fix them; poked Miklos yesterday

      • continuing to work on this.

  • tested 6.4.10 manually and it looks better, still had some crashes

    • didn’t have anything related to mpWindowImpl

    • one is related to memory corruption – window disposing somehow

    • others – related to Graphical objects; overall it looks better more stable & fast.

Release schedule bits (Andras)

  • CODE 6.4.10 updates are coming – as promised last week

    • it went out

  • COOL 6.4.10 in the coming weeks – no final date

    • async save issues → still being working on

      • got a number of fixes in this week.

Android testing (Nicolas)

  • saw a couple of fixes that could improve performance / rendering speed

  • unfortunately – doesn’t look like it is as good as would imagine

    • bit of lag when zooming & scaling – still too much.

    • Needs digging more into the topic.

  • Found a better way to explain the issue

    • zooming in – is fine; out – when the page appears is slow …

      • re-positions the content somehow …

      • Page bit more on left/right – jumps etc. …

    • would be clever to more aggressively start to render tiles ASAP.

      • Just seeing the first page – or part of it

  • scrolling down – need to render more content – in the background …

    • something like this.

  • Will summarize findings – for the bug-tracker.

    • Not a big issue – the app works.

  • Should we continue holding the release? (Michael)

    • need to compare the last release with the new builds (Nicolas)

      • really helpful to know – don’t want to regress (Michael)

  • Latest APK test files

    • not able to switch into editing mode: switches,
      but don’t have a cursor and can’t edit anything.

    • Not tested recent builds (Kendy)

      • can you check the normal server online in the browser?

  • Readahead suggestion (Kendy)

    • something we’ve tried in the past – more problems than it solved.

    • OTOH – definitely we will do sooner than later:

      • we already draw the background & grid-lines in calc on the client

      • would like to do the same for pages in PDFs & impress / draw

        • also for writer at some stage.

        • So you’ll see how they are.

    • Think we need to get more clever wrt. readahead (Michael)

      • previously doing too much when people are mobile (Kendy)

      • on mobile very different editing view (Michael)

      • Mobile in readonly mode – we can pre-load more (Nicolas)

    • would be really useful to list the use-cases & we should come up with some measurement of these (Kendy)

      • in the past – we tried to think of the cases & we solved the wrong problems

        • measure, come up with metrics & fix that.

Do we plan to have a new testflight on iOS based on 6.4.10 ? (Nicolas)

  • currently focused on performance issues (Michael)

    • learn how to build it & do it on my own (Nicolas)

      • will focus on the Android part instead.

COOL community conference /day (Michael)

  • date TBD – after the LibreOffice conference

    • very short talks → 15mins tops.

    • Just one day I think.

  • CWatch this space.

Next Meeting

Next meeting will take place on Thursday, July 22, 2021 at 10:00 am (UTC)