Donations to The Document Foundation help us to grow our community, run our infrastructure, organise events and share knowledge. And as a result, LibreOffice keeps on improving for all users! Many thanks to all of our supporters. Here’s a quick infographic showing how we used your donations in 2021:
In April last year, The Document Foundation posted a tender to implement Curl based HTTP/WebDAV UCP in LibreOffice. Now we have an update from allotropia, the company that won the tender:
This is to report the recent activities we performed.
All included, we provided a total of 126 commits, that went into this development work (there were also 7 community contributions), which includes the previous work by Giuseppe. You can see the full list from the core repo, via:
git log --grep='webdav-curl'
…or see this link. From our side, this now concludes work on this tender. We hope the services rendered were satisfactory, and both The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice users will enjoy the new implementation!
FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development – and one of the biggest such events of its kind. This year, it took place online again, due to the pandemic.
Many LibreOffice community volunteers and certified developers gave talks at the conference, and now the videos are available for all to see! So if you want to learn more about LibreOffice technology, open standards and community activities, click the link below and enjoy.
LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, made up of volunteers, certified developers and companies in the wider ecosystem. Today we’re talking to Thorsten Behrens, who serves on The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors and works for allotropia…
I’m Thorsten Behrens, living in Hamburg, Germany. With a great team of LibreOffice experts, I run allotropia software GmbH, which specialises in Open Source and Open Standards consulting and products.
The code and the project itself had me involved from 2001 on (then still called OpenOffice.org).
We strive to be a full-service shop for all things LibreOffice. Just to list a few examples, we have helped companies to train their internal development team alongside a LibreOffice migration; we’re regularly developing bug fixes and new features for the office suite, and we’re also maintaining a number of extensions for the benefit of the entire ecosystem (e.g. the LibreOffice Eclipse development plugin, the Edit in LibreOffice Nextcloud plugin, or the LibreOffice Starter Extension).
Additionally, we’re offering LTS (long-time supported) versions of LibreOffice, via our partner CIB software GmbH. In the same vein, we also maintain customer-specific LTS branches, in case a larger organisation has decided to stick with one particular version of the suite.
And not to forget, allotropia also sponsors Michael Stahl, one of the editors of the OpenDocument Format, to keep the ODF standard evolving and keeping up with all the new LibreOffice features that need saving to disk.
Besides lots of smaller additions for LibreOffice 7.3, one of the highlights we’re currently working on is a port of LibreOffice to directly run in a browser – without any need for a server installation. We’re provisionally calling it LOWA – LibreOffice WebAssembly, since WebAssembly (WASM) is the underlying browser technology this is using.
Another feature we’re quite proud of, is the rewrite of LibreOffice’s old network file access code. That work was sponsored by The Document Foundation, has landed in 7.3, solved a number of long-standing problems, and at the same time got rid of over 17,000 lines of (pretty old) code.
There’s just a ton of work still to do, to make the LOWA LibreOffice really usable, so that will keep us pretty busy this year. Beyond that, we’re always eager to help making the overall developer experience for LibreOffice better – that helps us too, in our daily work! Along those lines, there’s another project currently underway, called CoverRest, to bring better and nicer integration with code coverage, static analysis and general code checking into the LibreOffice development process.
One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 7.3, our brand new major release. It’s packed with new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some stats…
These are just stats for our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.
The announcement Tweet was viewed over 30,000 times, and had 535 likes and 183 retweets. We’re also on Mastodon, a FOSS-friendly federated microblogging service: our Mastodon toot had 80 likes and 42 shares. Meanwhile, the Facebook post reached 17,162 people, with 530 reactions and 116 shares.
Our LibreOffice 7.3 New Features video has been popular, with 75 comments and 841 likes. (We also uploaded the video to PeerTube, an open source, decentralized and federated video platform.)
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As always, we posted the announcement on the /r/linux subreddit, where it had 1091 upvotes and 99 comments. We also have our own dedicated /r/libreoffice subreddit – check it out!
Huge thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release!
LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, made up of volunteers, certified developers and companies in the wider ecosystem. Today we’re talking to Caolán McNamara, a long-time LibreOffice developer who works for Red Hat…
I’m a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. on the Desktop Team since 2004! And I live on the west coast of Ireland.
We try and do a lot of different things, from integration with the GNOME desktop, Calc and UNO work, and porting to architectures such as aarch64 and ppc64le, but I can highlight some of the efforts we make in detecting flaws close to when they get introduced into LibreOffice.
We maintain the regular crashtesting infrastructure, where we import and export 120,000+ documents and typically fix, or identify the triggering commit, any new import/export failures as they are discovered.
Similarly, we maintain the LibreOffice Coverity instance and work to keep the warnings to an effectively zero level in over six million lines of code, as part of that early detection of code flaw process.
In the same theme, we manage the LibreOffice OSS-Fuzz work and work to maintain the level of import related issues to a minimum, especially as a tool to detect potentially security related regressions before they are released, with over 1000 fixed to date.
The last user interface feature I did for 7.3 was a little rework of the calc autofilter dropdown, to add “popup on hover” of the color filter submenus and adding color names and some other tweaks, which itself was just an extension of Samuel Mehrbrodt’s (allotropia) more substantial LibreOffice 7.2 work to support color filtering in the autofilter.
Another feature we worked on that landed in upstream 7.3 was extension of the command line conversion of spreadsheets to comma separated value files to additionally support the optional export of each tab of a spreadsheet to a separate output CSV file.
I’m working on GTK4 version of LibreOffice. It’s not finished by any means, but it’s mostly functional and making progress.
Follow Caolán’s LibreOffice work on his blog, and check out his FOSDEM talk about the GTK4 port.
