Category: Development

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…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

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).

What does allotropia provide in the LibreOffice ecosystem?

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.

What has allotropia been working on in LibreOffice 7.3?

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.

Looking beyond this release, what else are you planning to do?

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.

Find out more

• allotropia website
• LibreOffice by CIB
• allotropia on Twitter

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…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. on the Desktop Team since 2004! And I live on the west coast of Ireland.

What does Red Hat do in the LibreOffice ecosystem?

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.

We recently released LibreOffice 7.3 – what did you work on in that version?

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.

Looking beyond this release, what else are you planning to do?

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.

Today we’re talking to Bayram Çiçek, who’s helping to implement new features in LibreOffice as part of the Google Summer of Code…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Çanakkale, Turkey. I’ve just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University.

When I was a student, professors and instructors always told us about the importance and benefits of contributing to free and open source projects like LibreOffice. Since I was a LibreOffice user for years, the idea of not just being a user – but developing it, to go beyond being a user – has always been exciting to me. Therefore I decided to contribute to LibreOffice.

In November 2020, Hacettepe University organized an event called “ACM Hacettepe Lectures”. I attended the course “Contributing to Open Source Projects with C++” by Muhammet Kara. We sent our first patches to LibreOffice and Collabora Online together with other attendees, and this is how my journey began.

Then, I decided to apply to Google Summer of Code 2021, and I was lucky enough to get selected as a student under the mentorship of Muhammet Kara and Heiko Tietze, in the past summer. I worked on the most-annoying bugs, and tried to fix as many bugs as I could during GSoC.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Currently, I’m working on Tables in Writer, and hoping to add a diagonal-borders feature to it. After gaining some more experience, I’ll be working on some bugs that related to my GSoC project, as I mentioned in my GSoC final report.

Why did you decide to become a member of The Document Foundation?

I think contributing to LibreOffice is both fun and sometimes challenging. When ‘fun’ and ‘challenge’ come together, it creates a great community, as LibreOffice does; and being a part of this community makes you more passionate and stronger. And that’s why I wanted to become a TDF member.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

I will work on most-annoying bugs and I’ll be fixing as many bugs as I can in the future. Also, I want to actively contribute to Collabora Online.

On the other hand, I’ll continue to contributing to Turkish translation of LibreOffice and I want to be an active member of Turkish Community to spread the open source usage and LibreOffice.

Many thanks to Bayram for all his contributions, and enthusiasm in our community! And to everyone reading this: Find out what you can do for LibreOffice – have fun, build up your skills, and do awesome things 😊