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Archive for August 16th, 2005


Posted on August 16, 2005 - by jono

OpenOffice.org

Wandered in a little weary this morning after no breakfast and staying up late working on the book. Before I went to sleep I fixing a stack of bugs I inadvertently merged into the code when I applied some decent validation. Fixed that, read a bit of my book and fell asleep with my specs on. Sooz had to take my specs off while I was asleep and move them out of the way. Good job they didn’t get crushed really.

Lunched it with the man of ginger dreams and the baldaroon. We discussed some ideas for Season 3 of LUGRadio that will kick off after our summer break. Various ideas are flying around at the moment; some good and some insane. Rest assured though people, we won’t let Matt inflict the pub quiz on you. :P

You know, the snapshots feature in VMWare is excellent if you want to run Breezy – the packages are broken so often that I can simply roll back to a Hoary snapshot in VMWare, apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade I am there. This makes testing Breezy much easier. As many of you will be aware, last Christmas I dist-upgraded to Hoary and ran it as my main system. I had a particularly hairy couple of months using the system and I don’t think I will be doing that again on my main machine.

Spent some time today learning a bit more about the OpenOffice.org release process. I had a chat with Michael Meeks about some of the issues and also garnered some input from the OpenOffice.org IRC channel. It was interesting getting some decent feedback about the desire for a six-monthly release process and how it could improve the software. The difficulty is that the current release schedule is tied together with the StarOffice schedule. Most commercial software has a slower release process and as such it conflicts with the Open Source OpenOffice.org process. This can certainly be improved and Michael is keen to see a shorter release process implemented.

There is so much potential for OpenOffice.org, but I really feel sorry for 100 or so developers who grapple with the 8 million lines of code that they hack on. I never realised that OpenOffice.org actually includes its own libc and its own Python tree. On modern distributions such as Debian and Fedora it can use a shared library on the system, but the entire suite is still a huge engineering undertaking. I am going to be writing an article about this and hopefully encourage some more people to join the project. Michael assures me that there is so much that non-l33t hackers can do. Translations, documentation, artwork, simple one-line fixes and much more. If you have some spare time and want to contribute to a really important project, go and help OpenOffice.org.