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goal of the camp and background
Praveen : Fixing out bug in OpenOffice and Debian packaging.
==== Goal of the Camp ====
Because this was first of its kind experiment, at least for Praveen, the details of the camp was not announced earlier. One reason was not to set wrong expectations, other was his dislike of comforming to schedules and topics. His personal style is to cover whatever is required to get to one task. So if he were to announce the exact goal, there was every possibility of falling short of that or having to compromise on some topics to achive the goal. Both of them were not desirable for him and he chose not to set clear goals. Basic goal of this camp, according to Praveen, was to introduce Free Software development process using personal experience of developers. Now that the idea is out, he does not claim any ownership, whatsoever on this idea, after all the idea was gained from the community. He can argue for credit only for the content of this particular instance only, because Sooraj and many others wer involved with the idea of the camp itself. So feel free to remix it, this was alpha release, so smoothen the rough edges. During early stage discussions Shyam was also involved and we dedicate this series on his memories.
==== Background ===
We decided to explore one bug in Open Office as a starting point. This particular [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=591615 bug in Malayalam display] was reported by Mahesh T Pai about 4 months back in August 2010 in debian BTS. The same bug turned up in Fedora 14 and with help from Ani Peter and Red Hat i18n team (Pravin Satpute and Naveen Kumar), we were able to track [http://bugs.icu-project.org/trac/changeset/26090/icu/trunk/source/layout/IndicReordering.cpp the offending commit] and reported it to ICU developers. This particular change was reverted upstream. Patched versions of icu appeared in both fedora and debian which restored correct rendering in Open Office.
This was a "teaching moment" for people to understand the inner workings of the Free Software community and get familiarised with people and process involved. It was logical for Praveen to pick this bug, because he knew the inside story and was involved in many of the steps (or he "lived through this bug").
==Photos ==
