Ten Reasons to start to contribute to LibreOffice now

Ten quick reasons why LibreOffice is a great place to make your blow for Free Software, with some detail about how we make this a fun place for you to get involved.

LibreOffice DevRoom, FOSDEM, Brussels, 4th February 2012

Transcript

1. 1 Ten reasons to start to contribute to LibreOffice now Bjoern Michaelsen bjoern.michaelsen@canonical.com
2. 2 Random comment on the Interwebz “Have you ever tried to contribute to Open/LibreOffice? The project is infamous for basically ignoring the contributions of the non-blessed.” – Anonymous guy on the net
3. 3 Reason 1: Easy Hacks! http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks too successful for itself simplified by bugzilla integration
4. 4 Reason 2: There is more than C++ No need to be a 31331 hax0r to start contributing Of course, we are still interested if you are one ;) You might become a domain expert faster than you can say “LibreOffice is a great project!”, no matter where you start from
5. 5 Reason 3: Buildbots/Gerrit (WiP Robert Einsle) Currently: http://tinderbox.libreoffice.org/MASTER/status.html Coming soon: Setting up Gerrit to allow: precommit (to master) builds requesting specific builds well archived code reviews Opt-in and no obstruction of current workflow
6. 6 Reason 4: gbuild/packaging Once (simplified): 1) Unpack a tarball of tarballs 2) We patchsystem by patching patches 3) We ran the patchsystem, which: Unpacks the tarballs we got out of 1) Patch some default patches on the source Apply the patches we patched into the patchsystem in 2) Start the build Now (LibreOffice 3.5): Unpack and patch the source with DebSrc3.0 Start the build
7. 7 Reason 5: One git 1) Question the Status Quo Do we really need ~20 repositories? Shouldnt we make it much easier? 2) Provide a proof of concept: merge all repositories 3) … 4) Profit!
8. 8 Reason 6: bibisect Idea: Put More than Fifty complete binary LibreOffice builds Into One git repository! “... there are crazy people like you on the LibreOffice project ...”
9. 9 Reason 6: bibisect awesomeness 53 complete Linux 64-bit LibreOffice installs compiled on Ubuntu 11.10, but works elsewhere too over a range of >5000 commits At 450 MB each, that would be 22GB However, it is only 749MB download size That is less than 15 MB per install
10. 10 Reason 6: bibisect awesomeness “I am happy that there are crazy people like you on the LibreOffice project. Every sane person would have been sure that this cannot possibly work out.” – Michael Stahl “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – G. B. Shaw
11. 11 Reason 7: buildtimes/debugging ~1 hour for a development build --disable-binfilter --disable-mozilla no l10n on a decent machine ~5 minutes for a complete rebuild with a warm ccache make debugrun Python String helpers
12. 12 Reason 8: crosscompiling No developer likes to run Windows, but quite a lot of our users are there LibreOffice (on Windows just as much as elsewhere) is a critical stepping stone for the migration to a liberated software world 15 Minutes MinGW builds with warm ccache
13. 13 Reason 9: LibreOffice HackFests! The Munich Hackfest (2nd Sept. 2011) was awesome! The Eindhoven HackFest (10th Sept. 2011) was good too! Hamburg (Spring 2012) will be even better!
14. 14 Reason 10: Send us a patch/Talk to us on IRC #libreoffice-dev on freenode
15. 15 Unreasonable? Join us! “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – G. B. Shaw