[oi-dev] Request for volunteers: Building LibreOffice

[Alasdair Lumsden]

Hi Philip,

Many thanks for getting in touch!

On 20 Sep 2011, at 22:28, Philip J. Robar wrote:
<snip>
> I used to do this type of thing all of the time for my group’s local server when I was at Sun so I can probably help*. However, when I found the source tar balls at LibreOffice’s site I was unmoved by the lack of documentation. But then, I found this site: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/ — which seems to be the place to get stated, yes?

Fantastic :-) Yes, LibreOffice needs work in this area - it's going to be a bit of a nightmare to build. But that certainly looks like a good place to start.

> Since it already builds on numerous UNIX™ and UNIX like systems I presume that the port ought to be pretty straight forward. Is there anything in particular that I need to know about before I get started?

LibreOffice unfortunately has a really ugly compiler/platform specific ABI:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/bridges/source/cpp_uno

On Linux/BSD it expects gcc and on Solaris it expects Sun Studio. So for now the LibreOffice developers are recommending we use Sun Studio to build it, although they would welcome support for gcc on Solaris, but it would require someone with assembly skills. Probably not important at the moment.

Because LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice you'd think it would build out of the box, but unfortunately the fork was done by a consortium of Linux distributions who have taken an axe to the core of it and I can't say for sure what issues you're likely to encounter, but they have said they will accept patches upstream to fix build issues on other platforms.

I'd recommend dropping by IRC if you can, to #oi-dev on irc.freenode.net - we have someone from the LibreOffice development team in there (his nickname is ftigeot) who knows about the build system and can offer help/pointers if needed. There is also #libreoffice-dev

Cheers,

Alasdair