Behind the scenes at TDF: Release Engineering

LibreOffice proper

The year 2015 started off with LibreOffice 4.4.0 and 4.3.6 rc1 – only the first of a whopping 42 (of course!) tags that were created and for which a build was uploaded to our mirror network – and ends with the stable releases 4.4.7 and 5.0.4 and with the first RC for LibreOffice 5.1.0 (for those interested: that’s a total of 216GB for the binary builds).

This constant stream of builds allows our volunteer testers to always stay on top, not waste time with testing stuff only to find out a fix has already been checked in weeks ago.

But even the constant stream of full builds sometimes is not recent enough. Daily builds provided by various tinderboxes fill this gap. Not only do they constantly monitor the buildability of all current branches (and nag committers in case our continuous integration platform didn’t catch the problem before it ended up in the code), many also provide one installationset per day. That way users don’t have to fiddle with building LibreOffice themselves, but still can run the current code.

We also changed our release baseline:

• since LibreOffice 4.4 we require Mac OS X 10.8 or later and dropped the 32bit version

• since LibreOffice 5.0 we added 64bit builds for Windows (requiring Vista or later, 32bit build requires Windows XP SP3 or later)

• since LibreOffice 5.1 the new baseline for Linux is CentOS 6 (kernel 2.6.32 or later, glibc 2.12 or later)

Pootle

But the year was not only spent on LibreOffice alone. After having migrated bugzilla to our own infrastructure, it was time to tackle pootle. As mentioned in the last behind-the-scenes, we upgraded our version of pootle to run on TDF-hosted hardware and added master workflow. This allowed translators to start with their work for the 5.0 and subsequently 5.1 much earlier than with the old process (where translation could only begin after the branch was created).

Android

Good news everyone, there’s now a LibreOffice Viewer for Android! While still in its infancy, it is a first step to an editor application that you can use to give your documents the final touch when on the road.

If you own a smartwatch, then you also might be interested in the updated Impress Remote for Android, that now integrates with Android Wearable devices.

Hackfests

Continuing from last year, Hackfest-VMs were provided for the various gatherings that took place in 2015 and will be provided to those happening in 2016. Participants don’t have to roll thumbs waiting until the build is finished on their personal machines, but can instead start digging into the code on a fast virtual machine, and also do some bibisecting to warm up/find an easy entry point.

tl;dr

• nearly one LibreOffice build per week on top of that daily builds from tinderboxes

• Impress Remote for Android got support for Wearables

• LibreOffice Viewer for Android with basic editing capabilities

• Bugzilla was migrated to TDF-Infrastructure

• Pootle server was upgraded and moved to TDF-Infrastructure, with translators now being able to work on master branch