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LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2018 – get involved!

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a yearly programme in which Google funds university students to work on free and open source software projects. LibreOffice has benefited from this – last year 10 students were accepted into GSoC to do various programming jobs, helping to improve the software.

GSoC students are assisted by experienced “mentors” in the LibreOffice community, as 2016 student Jaskaran Veer Singh explains:

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For 2018, LibreOffice is again an organisation in the GSoC programme, so if you’re a university student and want to get experience working on a well-known free software project, while also being paid for your efforts, get involved! But don’t delay: the application period runs until March 27, so it’s not far off.

To get started, check out some ideas for projects you can work on. Each project describes what’s involved, the skills required, and the mentor you can contact to get help. If you see something you’d like to work on, contact the mentor as soon as possible! Then you can discuss how to proceed.

After that, read the general GSoC 2018 page on our wiki, which provides more information on the GSoC programme and tells you how to apply. So, check out the ideas, talk to the mentors, and good luck with your projects!

How LibreOffice and TDF are helping other open source projects

Free and open source software (FOSS) is all about sharing and working together. And while LibreOffice focuses on being the best open source office suite, our community also helps out with other related FOSS projects (just like many other projects help us!). We’ve made an infographic showing “upstream” contributions from LibreOffice developers and The Document Foundation – click to see a bigger version…

Your donations have helped us to achieve much of this – so a big thank you to everyone who has donated to our project and community!

LibreOffice contributor interview: Anxhelo Lushka

This year’s LibreOffice Conference will take place in late September in Albania. One of the organisers is Anxhelo Lushka, a member of the Albanian LibreOffice community – we caught up with him at the last conference to talk about his experiences of building a community, how developers and designers can work together, and what we can look forward to in Tirana…

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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.0.2

Berlin, March 1st, 2018 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 6.0.2, the second minor release of the recently announced LibreOffice 6 family in just over a month, with around 50 bug and regression fixes. All LibreOffice users are invited to update either to LibreOffice 6.0.2 or to LibreOffice 5.4.5 to solve potential security-related issues.

TDF suggests to conservative users and enterprises to deploy LibreOffice with the backing of certified developers, migrators and trainers (an updated list is available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/). This is extremely important for the growth of the LibreOffice ecosystem.

Technical details about LibreOffice 6.0.2 bug and regression fixes are available in the change log: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.0.2/RC1 (fixed in RC1).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 6.0.2 is immediately available for download at the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and fund the activities of local communities, such as the event in Surabaya, Indonesia, on March 23/25 (http://libreoffice.id) or the hackfest in Hamburg, Germany, on April 6/8 (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Hamburg2018).

Several companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) provide either value-added LTS versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and training, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice 6.0: Exploring the QA statistics

By Xisco Faulí, Quality Assurance (QA) engineer

LibreOffice 6.0 was released on January 31 and this is what happened during its development in LibreOffice’s Bugzilla, which started when the 5.4 branch was branched off from master on May 18 2017.

Note: This blog post has been created based on bugs in Bugzilla that have the whiteboard ‘target:6.0.0’, which means a commit for that bug is included in the release. Other commits referring to other bug trackers (ofz, coverity, rhbz, bnc, etc…) are not covered here, as well as others commits not having a reference to our bug tracker (ie refactoring commits).

In LibreOffice 6.0, a total number of 926 bugs and 88 enhancements were worked on, of which 747 were reported during 2017 (73%), and 267 (27%) between October 2010 and December 2016. July 2017 and August 2017 were the months with more reports, 104 and 108 respectively.

284 reports are related to Writer, 175 to Calc, 134 to LibreOffice in general and 112 to Impress.

This is all thanks to 382 users who reported them.

TOP 10 Reporters

Xisco Faulí ( 74 )

Yousuf Philips (jay) ( 69 )

Telesto ( 59 )

Tamás Zolnai ( 44 )

Aron Budea ( 38 )

Gabor Kelemen ( 26 )

Regina Henschel ( 23 )

Samuel Mehrbrodt (CIB) ( 22 )

Mike Kaganski ( 18 )

Olivier Hallot ( 17 )

Once a report has been created in Bugzilla, a third person needs to jump in, triage and confirm it in order to set it to NEW. This is a very important step as it helps the QA Team to deal with the hundreds of bug reports we receive every week.

Doing it in a short period of time after the bugs are reported guarantees those with more priority get fixed more quickly.

67% of the reports were confirmed within the first day, 84% within the first week and 93% within the first month.

Comparing when the reports were created and when they were confirmed gives a similar chart.

This is all thanks to 113 users who confirmed them.

Top 10 Confirmers

Xisco Faulí ( 225 )

Buovjaga ( 92 )

Yousuf Philips (jay) ( 48 )

Aron Budea ( 42 )

Julien Nabet ( 38 )

raal ( 37 )

Tamás Zolnai ( 28 )

Heiko Tietze ( 28 )

Alex Thurgood ( 25 )

V Stuart Foote ( 23 )

Finally, once the reports have been confirmed and triaged, the developers need to investigate and fix them. Sometimes, it can be trivial fix that takes a few minutes to get fixed – sometimes it takes several man days.

10% of the reports got fixed within one day, 51% within one month and 80% within one year.

Taking a closer look at the period between 2017-05-18 and the final release, 111 bugs were fixed in average a month, being August 2017, September 2017 and October 2017 the highest, with 147, 147 and 139 reports fixed respectively.

This is all thanks to 100 developers who fixed them.

Top 10 fixers

Caolán McNamara ( 105 )

Tamás Zolnai ( 57 )

Julien Nabet ( 48 )

Eike Rathke ( 46 )

Miklos Vajna ( 43 )

Michael Stahl ( 41 )

Adolfo Jayme ( 41 )

Yousuf Philips (jay) ( 39 )

Justin L ( 31 )

Heiko Tietze ( 28 )

For more QA statistics, please watch my recent talk at FOSDEM 2018:
https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/ode_overview/

Join in, and help our QA community to polish future LibreOffice releases! We’re a friendly and growing project, and there are many ways to get involved: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/GetInvolved

Making Macro Programming a Breeze: The BASIC & API Reference Cards

Update: Reference card for runtime library is now available.

One of the recurring issue when using LibreOffice as a replacement of other office applications is the migration of macros to the LibreOffice BASIC dialect and objects. While the LibreOffice BASIC programming language is almost standard, the objects inside a document have different names, methods and properties, and a rework on the macro is necessary in most cases to make it operational again, when imported from other suites.

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