LibreOffice Munich Hack-fest

The intense pace of development work on LibreOffice as we approach our 4.0 release has rather delayed an update on our recent extremely successful LibreOffice hack-fest. To give an idea of the work going on, instead of the around 1500 commits per month we normally get, we had nearly a month’s worth of commits in the last two weeks before our feature freeze, with lots of bug fixing ever since; things have been busy.

Some portion of this work was done by the more than thirty LibreOffice developers that arrived to augment the existing Munich Limux developers – who kindly hosted us. Munich is a forward looking enterprise who have deployed Linux to their fifteen-thousand users, and have committed to moving to LibreOffice.  First of all – many thanks to our friendly hosts who provided a great venue, helped feed us, so we could continue coding late into the night, and tidied up the detritus afterwards: your contribution is greatly appreciated.

It was also nice to meet a number of the Debian guys – who had a separate room for a parallel bug squashing party some of whom took an interest in and did a little LibreOffice work too. We had over thirty participants for LibreOffice alone, with other new people we’d never met before showing up and getting involved over the weekend which was particularly encouraging.

So what did we get done ?

as always with LibreOffice there were a lot of scattered improvements; you can read the full list in the wiki, but here are some highlights:

• Miklos with Michael Stahl obsoleted a great chunk of horrible RTF filter, improved performance and should significantly improve our copy/paste behavior on windows from MS Office.
• Robert, David, Bjoern and Norbert(remotely) helped get a staging / gerrit test site up and running to help upgrade and manage our gerrit instance (which makes contributing patches very easy)
• Kendy made the UI for the drop-down style selector very much more attractive with live previews
• Rob Snelders and Christine Koppelt made some great strides improving the (pretty) Bug Submission Assistant that Loic originally created to give bugzilla an end-user usable bug filing front-end.
• Michael Meeks worked on getting to the bottom of an intermittent Java / LibreOffice crasher causing the critical Wolmux e-government plugin problems. Thanks to Andrew Haley of RedHat for fixing the underlying problem (in Java naturally).
• Lionel and David made improvements to ‘Base’ and helped debug longer term issues
• Thorsten worked on polishing the Android remote-control for Impress
• Markus made conditional formatting even more beautiful and stable in Calc
• Peter Baumgarten produced a beautiful playterm session (with video thanks to Cloph) to help people build LibhreOffice as well as some German comment translations.
• Christina Roßmanith worked on  improvements for SVG import
• Markus Maier translated some German code comments, and helped migrate dialogs to the new UI layout.
• Italo Vignoli – inspired us with various kinds of wonderful Italian food.
• and more (that was not easy to enumerate).

It was excellent to see so many friendly faces, introduce new people to the team, get people more familiar with the code, meet old friends and be encouraged about the great progress we’re making. Getting everyone to stand in one place, at the same time proved rather problematic, however here is a picture of a subset of twenty-plus happy LibreOffice contributors, and some Debian-ites:

Finally, none of this can happen without people helping to host and fund the work.  Many thanks to those who provided financial and logistical support to the enterprise – as well as our many individual donors who help support The Document Foundation’s ability to get developers together to improve their productivity.

The Limux Project: hosting and co-organising, thanks to Jan-Marek Glogowski

Thorsten Heintke – an individual donation for travel bursaries

Credativ GmbH for food and beverages

DBI Klarl & Schuler GmbH for the saturday pizza