Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #50

Development Meeting Minutes
1

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #50

Date: Nov 25, 2021

Next meeting: Dec 2, 2021

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

Attendees (write your name):

  • Pedro, Gabriel, Lubos, Aron, Michael, Andras, Kendy, Gokay, Pranam, Alexandru, Ezinne

Community update (Pedro)

Design bits (Pedro)

  • Improvements & fixes for annotations.
    • Not just normal ones – but when typing
  • Avatars – list is now different inside the app …
  • more fixes on the toolbars
  • Somehow we manage to have the Welcome dialog
    • got it in – nice that it is there.
  • Sidebar – many fixes there, still some things to be improved.
  • Were some very annoying bugs on the notebookbar affecting webkit.
  • Still have font larger/smaller & other bits offset (Michael)
    • staging is not up-to-date as of this morning (Pedro)
    • can re-enable updating staging after each commit (Andras)
  • Shortcut toolbox / save-icon & full-screen icon got improved
    • improved in contrast – save-icon when un-saved has a better color but doesn’t rely 100% on color – has a visual difference too.

Cypress tests (Pedro)

  • in good shape, some things that had to be updated on scroll-tests
    • Rashesh did that this morning.

Schedule & update (Andras)

  • CO-2021
    • 21.11 – RC3 / final … was announced ~15minutes ago
    • CODE packages & docker image available for download.
    • Will do another re-spin in a few days
      • surely we will find minor issues we’d like to fix quickly.
    • Waiting for feedback – perhaps by feedback server – lets see.
      • Came up after a second – with later – it came up again.
      • Not sure if we have the latest patch included (Kendy)
        • changing the counter … a review problem in there.
        • Not sure if it is merged.
      • Can we take down the feedback server to stop this ? (Michael)
        • Aron / Andras → to test this & lets see …
    • Feedback is turned on in CODE (Andras)
      • feedback comes up immediately.
      • Press ‘later’ it doesn’t work, and then it comes up again and you press ‘later’ and it goes.
      • Also got it early – but not sure of the reason (Aron)
    • How do we get Welcome & Feedback concurrently ? (Michael)
      • two popups will not be open concurrently (Pedro)
        • if something else open – it will block opening feedback.
        • So we do get a Welcome dialog first.
    • Other equivalently embarrassing problems ? (Michael)
      • hard to know – put it into CODE package building this morning (Andras)
        • not encountered anything else.
  • 6.4.15
    • would like the About box sorted out – LibreOffice Technology in all possible views:
      • Desktop, Mobile, Mobile-app etc.
      • need to port stuff (Pedro)
        • and test – and hopefully without much work should just work.
        • On CO-2021 we have it in these views.
      • Need to port this & other things.
  • CO 2021 last bits (Kendy)
    • mostly everything we had on the radar is done.

Misc 1&1 bits (Gabriel)

  • PDF patch – kendy just merged
    • person who created the forum topic – uses 6.4.x
    • we can back-port it 6.4.x …
      • sounds good (Kendy)
    • He uses 6.4.9 – should we use that ?
      • Just back-port to cp-6.4 and co-2021 (Kendy)
      • and master & co-6-4 for online piece (Michael)
  • Bug related to saving → CO-2021
    • want to investigate why inode changes on core side
      • if so then hard-linking optimization is useless.
      • Will investigate that.
    • Why does debug.html not work ? Perhaps investigate.
  • Quick update (Alex)
    • starting this week – again on COOL contributions
    • looking into tickets to see which can be completed most quickly.

Default to Notebookbar (Kendy)

  • it is merged: one thing that could be interesting
  • if someone had explicitly ‘notebookbar’ in the config file
    • then they might want to change it to “default” so
      the integration can change this to their taste.

A11y work (Gokay)

  • working on this, for screen-readers – trying to make Online ready
  • Some work on the core side – Online side is getting ready
  • Core side is working to expose paragraph texts to screen-readers in a short while.
  • Testing – have a PR for the core-side to send in a short while
    • good to look at the design together (Michael)
      • sounds exciting.

Update on what we’re up to (Szymon)

  • Did a validating list-box for calc, to see possible values for cells
  • fixed a save-as problem that pushed sessions to different nodes
  • fixed some animation problems in the sidebar
  • working on pasting into calc input-bar problem
    • we create a new clipboard object for this case; not re-using the per-session LOK clipboard, have a partial solution
      • perhaps move this code from the desktop/ module
      • so we can create the right instance; just use generic one when system is requested.
        • will look to see if we can do this better.

Performance bits (Lubos)

  • Noticed online uses a lot of std::strings – some of this could be improved
    • would require C+±17
    • we currently are on c+±11
  • Does anyone know why we’re still on c+±11 ?
    • The core is on c+±17 for a long time.
  • We used to support old Linux distros with gcc-4 (Andras)
    • its no longer there – we dropped Debian 8 long ago.
    • It’s fine to use the same tooling / baseline as core does.
  • Will send a pull-request to upgrade this
    • if something happens we can revert – will find out fast when building snapshots (nightly)
  • How does this help ? (Michael)
    • in one place is the token parsing: using std::string (Lubos)
      • creates quite a lot of copies
      • should use more modern std::string_view for this.
      • Will look at this in the future
  • Have some WIP Calc perf. improvements from a month ago
  • have updated Online – now tests don’t work
    • problem getting perf-test to show problems – can’t watch in in the browser.
    • And modify URL from make-run; bisected to the WOPI changes …
    • test changes some copy or something …
    • help appreciated – will send a mail with steps to reproduce.
    • Now the document doesn’t change while the test runs.
  • The new way – works like when you paste it into the browser (Kendy)
    • cypress tests – now have an additional iframe inside.
    • Now what you get as a URL for testing – is the same as what we would
      get in the integration for our code.
    • Cypress – has updated some of the tests so they can live with that.
    • Perhaps perf-tests need updating some way too.
    • The old way of opening is/was not removed – just re-use the old way of creating URLs.

Quarentine (Pranam)

  • Now merged and functioning …
  • some situations where we crash – and the file which crashed us is not preserved
  • when you enable the feature - they are saved so we can see later what caused the issue.
  • Off by default, needs enabling in coolwsd.xml
  • 0.15 → 0.3% of problems in convert-to ? (Michael)
    • can we get the document ?
      • we kill the process in the end.
    • Don’t have access to live documents (Gabriel)
      • but probably we can get stack traces
      • send an ABRT first – which triggers call-stack.
      • Worth upgrading first before looking for crashes …
        • too old – maybe most of them were solved already.
  • Possible to get this deployed on our demo servers (Andras)
    • missed RC3 – but on demos using snapshots
    • not 100% sure how it works; quarentine everything, remove files after 30 minutes, and manually figure out what crashed ?
      • At the moment – quarentine every file (Pranam)
        • before loading, and after each save, and before unload.
        • To improve it – working on making it crash specific.
        • A temporary fix for now.
        • In filename we have the pid (Andras)

Announcing CODE 21.11 (Cor)

Pull Requests in Need of Attention (Kendy)

Next Meeting

Thursday, Dec 02, 2021 at 11:00 am (UTC) (12 CEST)