OfficeBuzz

So, this was a busy and inspiring day. About hacking, sadly that happened only a little. Someone had his laptop stolen this morning, others were getting the build environment in shape again after different use, experimental OS-installations, another still hacking the Windows build system.. In effect there was only *one* building system: mine ;-) Which Rob gratefully used to work on the Scanner window. So Joost, who delivered a patch earlier (renaming sheets in Calc while copying) and I looked the code, hunting for ideas / hacks at various places in the code. You know, the things that you hope/expect to be not tooooo complicated. Yes, those ;-) Was good and I learned some useful things. Sad still, that little work in the code was done this day. Nevertheless, all 7 that attended were pretty happy with the gathering. There was a lot to talk about things that happened since last year. What is so obvious for the people that are active in the international project week after week, can be com...

Last weekend there was a tremendous event for LibreOffice hackers in Münich. [1]. More than 30 people joining for some days and working on features, bugs, UX (and pasta ..) It's obvious that there is a great base of LibreOffice users and devs in Germany (and Italy ;-) ) What about The Netherlands and Flanders? We had some small events already last year. With between 5 to 10 people joining and learning about, cooperating on localisation, development, features.. The next Saturday we have a new event planned. In the science city of Eindhoven. We also invite the old friends from OOo to share about all that's going on and cooperation. More on the wiki [2]. 1] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011 2] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/NL/bijeenkomst_11-09-10

It's been a while since I wrote here. And now some bits about LibreOffice development... I won't start explaining much technical details here - that is beyond my competences. But recently I have been hanging around some day's on the developers IRC channel. That was for some help to get used to building LibreOffice from source because I like to work/test with new features, and to dig a bit in the code here and there. Well building LibreOffice turns out to be really simple [1]. Not that is is necessary to do for bleeding edge testing: there are nightly builds available regularly [2]. When I say: building LibreOffice is really simple, I have to add that this is on Linux mainly. Which brings me more to the core message of this blog post. While being on IRC and also lurking on the developer list -as usual- I became very much impressed by all the hard and tough work that the developers do. The ones doing it as full time job, but not less the ones that do it alongside other ...