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Meeks: LibreOffice progress to 3.4.0
Michael Meeks digs in to the changes that went into LibreOffice 3.4, including better translation support, merging changes from OpenOffice.org (part of which was a "multi-million-line" OO.o cleanup patch), adding more build bots, and more. One major area of work was in doing some cleanup to reduce the size of LibreOffice: "First - ridding ourself of sillies - there is lots of good work in this area, eg. big cleanups of dead, and unreachable code, dropping export support from our (deprecated for a decade) binary filters and more. I'd like to highlight one invisible area: icons. Lots of volunteers worked on this, at least: Joseph Powers, Ace Dent, Joachim Tremouroux and Matus Kukan. The problem is that previously OO.o had simply tons of duplication, of icons everywhere: it had around one hundred and fifty (duplicate) 'missing icon' icons as an example. It also duplicated each icon for a 'high contrast' version in each theme (in place of a simple, separate high contrast icon theme), and it also propagated this effective bool highcontrast all across the code bloating things. All of that nonsense is now gone, and we have a great framework for handling eg. low-contrast disabilities consistently."
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Meeks: LibreOffice progress to 3.4.0 Posted Jun 3, 2011 19:07 UTC (Fri) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
The multi-million line cleaning was something LO did. It's just mentioned later in the same paragraph as the Oracle merge that was also done. For example the translation of comments was in the news earlier.
Meeks: LibreOffice progress to 3.4.0 Posted Jun 3, 2011 19:10 UTC (Fri) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
Oops, seems that the mind-boggling size of OOo/LO can include multiple multi-million line changes.
Meeks: LibreOffice progress to 3.4.0 Posted Jun 6, 2011 5:08 UTC (Mon) by Hausvib6 (guest, #70606) [Link]
Removed millions lines of codes -> reduced build time -> increased developer productivity -> better LibO.
Glad to see no more distractions caused by politics, legal, whatever non-technical yet useless issues in this flagship FLOSS office suite.
Meeks: LibreOffice progress to 3.4.0 Posted Jun 7, 2011 0:03 UTC (Tue) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]
Also, removed millions of lines of code -> clearer, cleaner code -> lower barrier of entry for newcomers -> increased developer participation -> increased productivity (even after you add in the Fred Brooks factor). I suspect this is a bigger issue than compile time.
Meeks: LibreOffice progress to 3.4.0 Posted Jun 4, 2011 1:58 UTC (Sat) by rworkman (subscriber, #47472) [Link]
Wow, that's awesome, Michael. Thanks to all of the contributors for all of the great work!
Meeks: LibreOffice progress to 3.4.0 Posted Jun 4, 2011 6:42 UTC (Sat) by zorro (subscriber, #45643) [Link]
Can someone explain why contributions to LibreOffice must be licensed under both LGPLv3+ and MPL? Is the motivation for this requirement documented somewhere?
Meeks: LibreOffice progress to 3.4.0 Posted Jun 6, 2011 15:32 UTC (Mon) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Because the LibreOffice *project* licence is LGPL3+/MPL+.
The only reason that the *program* is LGPL3/GPL3-*only* is because that is forced upon the project by virtue of that being the licence on the legacy OOo code.
Why the project chose that licencing, I couldn't say, but it's probably down to the TDF founders.
Cheers,
Meeks: LibreOffice progress to 3.4.0 Posted Jun 6, 2011 16:12 UTC (Mon) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
The reasoning from Simon Phipps - and I'm not sure where he got it from, but I did read him stating this in the recent furore - was that they chose the MPL so that they would leave contributions usable by others under proprietary licenses, as it's a pretty weak copyleft. In fact, I think he went as far as to say that they did it specifically for IBM so they could join the LO community.
Obviously without Oracle's help an MPL license is not much use given the underpinnings, but one would presume that IBM already effectively have rights to the v3 codebase anyway, so as a special case it should have worked well for IBM.
I would link explicitly to what Simon said, but with all the noise on the Apache list I can't find it again :(
Meeks: LibreOffice progress to 3.4.0 Posted Jun 6, 2011 16:18 UTC (Mon) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]
It is always wonderful to see effort spent on cleaning up projects, especially ones with older code. This is great. Thanks to everyone who worked on the cleanup.
Agree Posted Jun 6, 2011 18:41 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Too much cleanup changes can be a bad thing, but we sooo far from that point with LO that any cleanups are very welcome...
Thank you! Posted Jun 6, 2011 19:05 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I hate office suites, but they're a necessary evil, and LO is so much better than OO... (Actually, the "impress" and "calc" tools are pretty good. I guess I really only hate word-processors. :))
Thank you! Posted Jun 7, 2011 0:55 UTC (Tue) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Well, I hate Word and Writer.
WordPerfect was a glorified text markup editor. Maybe that's why I liked it so much. Unfortunately, since Corel re-wrote it for v9, it's become more and more Word-like, and more and more unpleasant to use :-(
Hopefully LO-writer will acquire a markup-editing-window at some point "soon", but I gather the internals are such a mess that that's currently a rather difficult task ... it sounds so simple, seeing as ODF is xml-based ...
Cheers,
Thank you! Posted Jun 7, 2011 6:38 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
And unfortunately, ODF does not represent the internal structures well. It has been a poltitical decision to make ODF the base format, not a technical one.
Thank you! Posted Jun 7, 2011 17:37 UTC (Tue) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
I think you've said rather better what I was trying to say :-)
If the internals do move towards ODF, then a markup-editing-window will become much easier.
Cheers,
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