early releases, continuous integration, warm bodies and cool machines

All the streamlining in LibreOffice package done upstream at LibreOffice itself, by Rene at Debian and the tiny bits and pieces I do on top of that at Ubuntu are beginning to pay off:

Yesterday a package containing a prerelease of the upcoming LibreOffice 3.6 major series has been uploaded to the upcoming Ubuntu Quantal series (due to be released as stable in October 2012) — a month earlier than we did a year ago on Oneiric. While this package is far from perfect in its current state, having it in this early is giving us a lot more real world test coverage — of which upstream LibreOffice will without doubt profit too. This will help improving the LibreOffice we will finally ship with in Quantal as it gives us more time to detect and fix errors in all of LibreOffice, LibreOffice packaging and Ubuntu Quantal — the platform it is build upon. So if you want to help in testing: get Quantal and start torturing LibreOffice on it.

This is approaching continuous integration as it should be. Speaking of which, not only do we have LibreOffice on Ubuntu being tested earlier by warm bodies, but also by cool machines: The Jenkins Bot Job that dutifully builds the LibreOffice package daily — and already gave early warning twice about changes in the stack below LibreOffice that caused the LibreOffice build to fail, which was very helpful — will now be switched to build the head of the libreoffice-3-6 upstream branch. Development on the release branch has slowed enough so that we can use that test builder now not only to detect conflicts/incompatibilities in Quantal as it is moving ahead, but also in upstream LibreOffice on the release branch.

One nitpick that we should probably fix is the collision of the LibreOffice and Ubuntu branding in the new splash screen — something that was bound to happen with the two brand colors being orange and green:

There are multiple possible solutions to this, the most simple one: removing the ubuntufied orange progress bar and making it white like upstream, but I cant help but notice that some of the other proposals like ‘clean’ although not winning the vote on g+ would not be that problematic. Your input on this topic is welcome, but having installed Quantal (and testing LibreOffice) is a prerequisite. 😉

LibreOffice in the Top Ten

A short shoutout: The LibreOffice Getting Started Guide by the LibreOffice Documentation Team made it to the Top Ten Paid App Downloads in Ubuntu. Congratulations and Kudos to Jean Weber and the whole Documentation Team! Of course, there is more LibreOffice stuff in the Ubuntu app directory we need to get to the Top Ten. 😉

Move from LiveJournal

I’m going slightly mad
It finally happened!

— Queen, Innuendo, I’m going slightly mad

As question “why does my post not appear to be visible to the world on the blog hours after I posted” was replied with: “Yeah, that is just the caching. There is nothing we can do about it”. I finally decided to leave the old home. Should have done that a lot earlier, I guess: The post is still not up almost six hours later.

Call for Testing: Ubuntu LibreOffice packages

Now these points of data make a beautiful line.
And we’re out of Beta.
We’re releasing on time.
Ellen McLain/Jonathan Coulton — Portal, Still Alive

Yes, its true: We are out of Beta and we are releasing on time!
And if you are adventurous, you can test the current LibreOffice 3.6.0 release candidate 1 from the LibreOffice prereleases PPA:

• for Quantal (Ubuntu 12.10)
• for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise)

Please especially test all the fancy new things in this release!
One late feature (came in with beta3) I would like to especially point out are the new masterpages in Impress by Alexander Wilms, Mateus Machado Luna, Stefan Knorr and all the other cool guys on the LibreOffice design team. And before anyone screams “pics or it didnt happen!” — here is a screenshot of them running on Ubuntu Quantal:

Garbage collecting the LibreOffice development wiki entry pages

“Oh, it’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it”
— Faith No More, “We Care A Lot”

I just cleaned and sorted the LibreOffice development pages:

• Development (compare the old version)
• How to Build (compare the old version)

which still contained lots of old, obsolete and even misleading content in a huge unsorted page, which likely nobody bothered to clean up because it … was a huge unsorted page. I hope the new pages with lots of obsolete stuff killed and lots of nonessential/reference stuff moved down to the end of the page, leaving the top of the page for the essentials will make life quite a bit easier for new contributors!

Rotated LibreOffice EasyHacks!

I just rotated the featured items on the LibreOffice EasyHacks Page. If you are interested in contributing and wondered what you could do, here are a few selected suggestions:

• Provide stacktraces for crashes in existing bug reports (Skills: Using a debugger, creating a build)
  

• Create a Libreoffice build session with playterm to help new developers (Skills: Building)

• bibisect regressions (Skills: bibisecting)

• get the build process to auto-magically copy the Visual Studio CRT files to the right place (Skills: build, autoconf)

• vector presentations crash LibreOffice on load when –enable-rsvg=no (Skills: Skills: building the beast, C++ and exception handling)

• Make macro editing easier (Skills: simple C++ programming, willingness to learn a bit of VCL)

• improve UNO API error reporting (Skills: building, simple C++ programming)

• remove explicit prototypes in basic/ (Skills: simple C++)

• Change visibility of comments / notes via Notes Ruler Control (Skills: C++)

• Wrong cross-reference text when Caption order is Numbering first (Skills: building, C++ hacking)

• Size of PDF files can been reduced by use of croped images (Skills: building, C++ hacking)

• Can’t select operating system in bugzilla assistant (Skills: JavaScript hacking)

You will find more info on the LibreOffice EasyHacks Page and an even wider range of things to do on the EasyHacks by required Skill Page.