new stuff:
database frontend is working
scripting framework works
in writer there is now a seperate dedicated table menu
autoshapes now exist, so msoffice import of them have a one to one mapping
writer’s format menu has been reworked
msoffice password protected documents can be imported, though I knew that already of course 
and the file format is now the oasis file format, new extensions
child workspaces:
for trivial build fixes it’s acceptable to just get on with it and fix the problems, and push through the workspace by setting yourself as qa and move it to nominated
I still think there’s an open question as to finding QA people for community workspaces which implement non-trivial changes. Serious QA volunteers to examine childworkspace builds could help here.
release schedule:
The general feeling was that a 6 month release schedule would suit most people. Certainly 18 months is too long.
nightly builds are not really possible for OOo, the current weekly/fortnightly builds are more or less equivalent to the mozilla nightly builds
If things don’t work in those milestone builds, let mh know and he’ll add the details to the release notes of the milestone. releases@openoffice.org is a good place to make known those sort of major problems with a build
At this point my notes say various waffle from crazy people, though I forget what was actually being discussed.
dan’s talk on layout UI:
need a new resource file format
we need a gui based dialog editor
dans wants to attract crackpot UI designers
layout based, not rigid pixel based
non-binary resource files, separate languages from it
mmeeks has prototype layout widget impl in ooo-build
Elizabeth Mattias brings up that English/German are used in parallel in Hamburg, so tools would/should work in both, and other knock on effects from that
nice to separate the translations from each other
MBA reckons one dialog per file would lead to too many small files.
xml is used for toolbars right now, binary cache exists in mozilla and in OOo for those toolbars.
separation of text for dialogs and the dialogs themselves obviously requires two separate parsing event, which might lag the UI a little ?
apparently there are 40,000 UI strings
cache xml end result, but then are there admin issues, a per user cache ?, what about on a readonly filesystems. Install a precacheed post-parse output ?
How mozilla works foo follows which is too hard for me to understand
dev@tools is the appropiate mailing list
the dread specter of gettext raises its head again, people get cross at eachother about gettext
Shiny New UNO:
basically this boils down to “uno has been fixed”
the foul and nasty UNO syntax for java and c++ is fixed, queryInterface disappears, all the monsterous casting gets removed, so things are typesafe again. Removing my two biggest hatreds
The irritating requirement to guess when SO is up and finished bootstrapping before controlling it through UNO is apparently replaced with a new api call.
Such startup code is also incredibly less verbose
The reason its confusing to read the documentation whenever a service is mentioned is because the idea of a service was a little confused. MediaDescriptor is mentioned as an example, which was exactly one of the “services” I never understood, so was glad to find out I wasn’t quite as stupid as I thought
so abstract services are now interfaces, and stuff called services will actually concretely do something
in IDL you can multiply inherit interfaces, all looks pretty neat
far shorter code, in all, a very nice bunch of changes I feel, makes UNO feel more like a normal part of c++/java and less like a square abstract peg hammered into a round c++ hole
Java Usage:
My own feeling is that if people are going to introduce new java tools into the build process that at the very least they give the rest of us forewarning. Java is problematic for a lot of us, licencing issues, practical limits of not available on some platforms, there can be version issues, and javaesque stuff like gcj and so forth currently need a bit of love and time to be tested with the OOo java usages to see if they are functional. chris’s nojava1 workspace brought us back to a build that could work without java, but 1.9.54 now has a new helpcontent2 module which gets built with a new java tool, which has scuppered us again 
–with-system-foos:
–with-system-jpeg does the right thing now
some bitrot set into the –with-system-curl which I also fixed
similiar issues affect the –with-system-expat which I’m fixing at the moment
discussed db3 vs db4 with Rene, boils down that it would be an awful lot easier all round to update OOo’s usage of db to db4. Rene to mail mailing lists to see if that would be a good thing to do from Hamburg’s perspective.
darragh mentions his continuing interest to see neon usage updated to newer neon api as well, reminds me that jbu is apparently updating to latest python as well
I’m bothered about mozilla configure flags, I’d like to merge disable-mozilla and –with-system-mozilla into a single –with-system-mozilla which then does the right thing and builds what can be built against the system mozilla and drops the stuff that uses any non-existant outdated or private mozilla apis.
Finally:
Had a pretty good time at OOocon this year, didn’t get to see much of Berlin, but got to meet nearly everyone I intended to. Less numbers of people than last year I think, but more developers. Seemed more of an intimate event, recognized most people there, whereas last year seemed almost more of a trade event. My only problem was self-inflicted where I had booked a hotel a bit far from the centre of things. That’s what you get when you leave things to the last minute. Next time I will be organized, organizing things is good.