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Report: LibreOffice Bug Hunting Session in Taiwan

LibreOffice’s worldwide community is active in many parts of the project – in development, localisation, documentation, design, marketing and more. There’s also the Quality Assurance (QA) community, which focuses on identifying and fixing bugs. At a recent event in Taiwan, a Bug Hunting Session took place to check bug reports, as Franklin Weng explains…

This event was based on a course in the department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng-Kung University. Professor Joseph Chung-Ping Young directed this course named “FOSS Community and Development”.

On November 29, we held a three-hour “LibreOffice Bug Triage Experience” event. A total of 70 students from NCKU and three members of The Document Foundation (Franklin Weng, Cheng-Chia Tseng and Jeff Huang) attended. First, Franklin introduced Bugzilla and the bug issue lifecycle: Report -> Confirm (Triage) -> Patch -> Code Review -> Close. In this event we installed the daily build master version of LibreOffice and focused on three things:

  • For issues marked as UNCONFIRMED, we tried to reproduce (confirm) them.
  • For issues marked as NEW, we tried to test if they has been solved in the master version.
  • For issues marked as REOPENED, we tried to make sure if the bugs were reproducible in the master version.

Students searched for these three kinds of bugs and randomly chose one to examine. The three TDF members helped and guided students during the whole session. In a short time, students found that it was a lot easier than they expected, so they were quite happy, excited and confident. We roughly estimate that in total, more than 100 bugs were confirmed/reported as not reproducible.

Thanks to Franklin Weng, Cheng-Chia Tseng and Jeff Huang for their help, and everyone who took part! Here are a few more photos from the event…

LibreOffice localisation sprint: Bengali

LibreOffice’s localisation communities translate the software’s user interface and documentation. They help to make a powerful office suite available to millions of people around the world, in over 100 languages! Biraj Karkamar reports on a recent localisation event in India:

Ten people participated in our sprint in Kolkata, on November 11. We made contributions together for the Bengali-India locale.

On November 4, we had pre-meetup on localisation portal basics. I gave the participants basic details on how to add suggestions and submissions in the portal. Also that day, participants created their profiles on the portal.

But in main event, we started with introductions, then we had a short recap on the pre-meetup. Then we had a hands-on portal. I showed the style guide of bn-IN locale translation, which we follow in open source localisation. Then the sprint started – which was almost five hours long.

Overall, the event was good and productive. Of course, it was fun too!

Thanks to Biraj and the community for their great work! See which other languages LibreOffice supports, and if your language isn’t on the list, help us to make it happen! Here are a few more photos from the event:

Quick report: LinuxDays and OpenAlt in Czech Republic

Want to help spread the word about LibreOffice, free software and open standards? Attend a local computing event, and tell people about it! Stanislav Horáček writes about some recent events in the Czech Republic…

With our LibreOffice booth, Zdeněk Crhonek and I attended the two biggest Czech FOSS events, LinuxDays in Prague and OpenAlt in Brno. We would like to share some of what we experienced:

– as usual, generally positive feedback from users, interest in new features and what is going on

– many questions about the status of LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice, the role of The Document Foundation etc.

– low awareness about LibreOffice Online; people were surprised that it is ready and that people are using it; some in interest in how to install it, others sharing experience that its deployment is too complicated

– more advanced users aren’t using LibreOffice so much, replacing it by simpler things like Markdown docs

– it’s nice that videos from the marketing team are available (about LibreOffice, join the community, new features…), showing them on the screen attracted visitors to the booth; but we’re missing a video about LibreOffice online (maybe an idea for the marketing team)

– discussion with someone from the National Technical Library in Prague (enthusiastic about FOSS, migrated client computers to Linux and LibreOffice, encouraging us to spread the word about it) and a representative of an organization trying to coordinate using FOSS in Czech municipalities (two towns running LibreOffice, with the intention to pay for some bug fixing)

– a meeting with the Slovak community (Miloš Šrámek and Andrej Kapuš) in Brno

– a meeting with the Czech localization community (Mozilla, Linux distributions), discussing mainly the possibility of a new Czech dictionary

– and a discussion with a marketing specialist who suggested ways to simplify the LibreOffice webpage (there are too many confusing subpages).

So in summary, we informed Czech FOSS people that there is active development of LibreOffice and that there is even some Czech community – thanks to organizers for the opportunity and to TDF for the support!

Thanks to Stanislav and Zdeněk for their help! Find out more: here’s the Czech LibreOffice website, Czech Ask site (for user support), and Czech mailing lists.

Munich Hackfest, October 2018: Roundup and photos

Hackfests are great opportunities for LibreOffice developers and community members to meet face-to-face, work on new features, fix bugs and enjoy good food! In late October, CIB hosted a hackfest in Munich, Germany, with 25 participants over the three days.

Check out the achievements section for full details on the results, but in summary: many bugs were fixed, some features were polished, and knowledge was shared. Two participants learned about building LibreOffice from source code, while others discussed non-technical topics such as marketing and local events.

A big thanks to everyone who took part – it was great seeing you! Here are a few photos, starting with the first evening, when a few quick presentations were given. Andreas Kainz discussed his work on the NotebookBar user interface design (also check out his blog):

Then it was time for pasta – penne all’arrabbiata and fusilli radicchio and gorgonzola…

On the second day, developers worked on various features and bugfixes:

Izabela Bakollari from the Albanian LibreOffice community worked with Bjoern Michaelsen to build the source code and commit some code changes:

Then it was time for more Italian food – this time, pizza!

On the final day, participants presented their achievements:

Most people headed home after that, but a few stayed around for a quick city tour and beer at the world-famous Hofbräuhaus:

We’ll be organising more hackfests next year, so keep an eye on this blog for updates!

Quick report: LibreOffice training in İstanbul

Gökhan Gurbetoğlu from our Turkish community organised some LibreOffice training earlier this month. Here’s his summary:

It was a two-day training, 2-3 October 2018, from 10:00 to 17:00. The training took place in İstanbul, as part of the Open Source in Public Institutions Conference’s local sessions (Kamu Açık Kaynak Konferansı).

There were 25 trainees on both days. The first day started with a quick introduction to LibreOffice’s interface and continued with Writer. Then the second day was for Calc. In Writer I focused on:

  • Introduction to Writer’s interface
  • Selection methods
  • Working with documents
  • Formatting: text, paragraphs, pages, styles
  • Referencing: index, table of contents, etc.
  • Tables, images and other embedded objects
  • Settings and customization

While in Calc I focused on:

  • Introduction to Calc’s interface
  • Working with spreadsheets: moving inside the spreadsheet, cell referencing, hiding, locking cells, etc.
  • Numbered lists and series
  • Formula bar and functions
  • Formatting: cells, pages, styles
  • Charts: creating and modifying
  • Data and filters
  • Ended with telling the most used functions in Calc

Thanks to Gökhan for organising the training and his report! Learn more about LibreOffice training and certification options here.

Coming up on 25 – 28 October: LibreOffice Hackfest in Munich

The LibreOffice community organises regular Hackfests, where developers and community members meet up, work on new features, fix bugs and enjoy good food! Later this month, we’ll meet in Munich, in the south of Germany. Munich is situated just north of the Alps, and is known for its cosy old town, churches and beer halls.

Interested in joining? Click here for the full details – and add your name to the list if you plan to attend!

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