Re: [birt-dev] BIRT Reboot - Some questions and remarks

[Wayne Beaton <wayne.beaton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I can answer some of the questions.

 

1) What is the official repository now?
Is https://github.com/eclipse/birt the official repository for the source

Yes.

 

is https://git.eclipse.org/c/www.eclipse.org/birt.git/ used for?

This is where we put the website content that you find at https://www.eclipse.org/birt. Anything committed to this repository will appear on the website after a few minutes. The intention is that the work that Christophe is working on now will be moved there.

 

2) I'd like to be a committer.
I'd fix the bugs listed above.

The path to committer status starts by making contributions. It sounds like you have a few contributions that are ready to go.

Create an EF account, sign the ECA and send your pull requests. Please make sure that your commits are "Signed-off-by".

Per the usual process, after making some contributions, we'll nominate you as a new committer.

There's more information about contributing and becoming a committer here.

 

7) Is it planned to mention companies and products *using* BIRT or only the main *contributors*?
Mentioning successful products would show the world that BIRT is used by thousands users on a daily basis (at least a few thousand users of our product).

Agreed. We do have a standard means by which adopters can upload their logos and information. I'll find some information about setting this up so that we can include it on the new site.

Wayne

 

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 8:40 AM Henning von Bargen <H.vonBargen@xxxxxxx> wrote:

The BIRT reboot is really great news!

We are using BIRT in our product.
For many years, the newer releases only introduced more bugs or didn't work at all (at least for our use case: working with an Oracle database)
So we are still using BIRT 4.2.1 for the IDE and 4.3.0 for production.
Last year (or was it 2019?) I finally gave up hoping and created my own fork.
Apart from some modifications regarding the Word emitter (which I think are useful, but change the behavior) I finally was able to fix some bugs that annoyed me.

The repository is at https://github.com/hvbtup/birt. You can see the list of differences in the Wiki:
https://github.com/hvbtup/birt/wiki/NotableDifferences

In particular, my repo contains fixes for the following bugs (from the old bug list) and the bug fixes should work with "official" repo as well:

Bug 519375 Birt inserts an extra space in DOCX if part of the word is highlighted using an HTML tag
Bug 565629 DOCX Emitter tables are shift left with Word 2016 or newer
Bug 562873 PDF Rendering error with dynamic text item after page break
Bug 433725 Enhancement for WordEmitter: Support pageBreakInside: avoid for table rows
Bug 432310 WordEmitter enhancement for page header: hide on first page

Furthermore, some smaller improvements are:
Support for Word "Field functions" using a user-property - well, this works, but using a user property is ugly.
So this is more a proof of concept, not ready for merging into the "official" repo.

So my questions and remarks are:

1) What is the official repository now?
Is https://github.com/eclipse/birt the official repository for the source - and what is https://git.eclipse.org/c/www.eclipse.org/birt.git/ used for?

2) I'd like to be a committer.
I'd fix the bugs listed above.

3) I tried to fix some typos in Christophe's new web site, but "Edit this page" results in Error 404.
It should be easy for us to help improving the site.

4) If I recall correctly,  the build is working again.
IMHO the very next steps should be:
4.1) Create a binary for MS Windows, enable users to download it and show how to get it running - even if it might not be perfect yet.
In this regard, https://chloetz.github.io/BIRT-Dev/docs/installation is looking good already, yet a few screenshots for users would help.
>From my own experience with BIRT training courses, I know that these very first steps are hard for newcomers (e.g. they don't know how to "open a perspective").
4.2) Enable developers to build BIRT on their own from the sources and document - how to compile both within the Eclipse IDE and with Maven.  This will help others to improve BIRT.

5) Topics that should be addressed once this is done:
5.1) Support generating PDF/A (I could probably help a bit here)
5.2) Replacing iText with OpenPDF. This has already been done by someone (see https://www.optimaw.ch/pdf-emitter/ and https://www.optimaw.ch/birt-reloaded/ )

6) More on PDF-Support:
6.1) Once 5 is done, it should be possible to create ZUGFeRD / Factur-X conforming invoices directly with BIRT, however this still requires coding from the report developer.
This format is a special case of PDF/A. I have done this with a PDF-postprocessor based on Apache PDFBox like this: Create a normal PDF with BIRT. The report also creates an XML file by the way. Once  the report is done, the PDF and the XML are merged into a Factur-X document.
6.2) Support creating PDF/UA (accessible PDF) - however, OpenPDF doesn't seem to support this yet.

7) Is it planned to mention companies and products *using* BIRT or only the main *contributors*?
Mentioning successful products would show the world that BIRT is used by thousands users on a daily basis (at least a few thousand users of our product).

Henning




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Wayne Beaton

Director of Open Source Projects | Eclipse Foundation