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From Brazil to Germany, an Unforgettable LibreOffice Hackfest in Freiburg

José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Souza, LibreOffice development in Brazil

Our first contact with the LibreOffice was in FISL 2012 (International Forum of Free Software, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil). Since then, we got quickly involved with the LibreOffice development community. Now we attend events in Brazil advocating to people about the better office suite ever done!

Months ago, after some time contributing to the project and participating in LibreOffice community, we, José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Paulo de Souza were invited to participate in the Freiburg LibreOffice Hackfest. We were very happy and very excited! This invitation showed us that we were recognized for our humble work in the project and because this is a unique opportunity to work with people that we just know by mailing or IRC chats. So, we started the preparations of travel, such as paperwork, funds and a negotiation with our employers.

f3-1

We arrived in Germany thinking about how to learn more about LibreOffice code base, and learn some tips and tricks to code while contributing with the project. The guys at the hackfest work full time in the project, so we were very excited to improve our skills, including stuffs about how to make a nice hackfest and try setup one in Brazil!

Our journey in Germany began in the beautiful city of Munich, where we stayed for two days. We met Christian Lohmaier, the current release engineer of LibreOffice project. He and Florian Effenberger were patient and generous to show Munich to us and all nice places of this nice city! Thanks a lot guys!

Then we went to Freiburg, where the Hackfest was to start. The event took three days. We had the opportunity to meet some of the most famous mega developers! It was a very nice experience to link faces and names to IRC nicks, and of course, to question the “pythons” of the project in real time! Surely, we learned a lot in these 3 days!

Marcos did some work in LibreOffice Math. The first was about including tooltips in the new Elements Dock. To solve this bug, we basically need to create some strings with the descriptions of each element in the Elements Dock. These strings are stored inside “.src” files. These files are “compiled” and used by translators to translate each string to a specific language used in the user interface of LibreOffice. This fix was not difficult, just painful!

The second bug that Marcos worked was about to implement a scrollbar in the Elements Dock. We did not finish this fix because he had some doubts and some points that need some other fixes. Still in the event, we talked with some others hackers about other issues.

I was focused trying to execute a static checker to detect some error prone code and fix them.f2-1

After three days of hackfest, we started the “Hamburg Home Hacking Marathon”! We stayed four days in Hamburg, coding in the house of LibreOffice enginners! Again, we had the pleasure to work with Eike Ratke, Michael Stahl, Stephan Bergmann and Bjoern Michaelsen. All of them willing to help us teaching about the code base and showing some tips.

Using our precious time with them, Marcos worked in the issue 60698 (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60698). This bug is about unify some shared libraries that are built by few files. Doing this we get a smaller library because these libraries are compiled and built just once, and by this we avoid the dispersion of shared libraries. Working in this bug, Marcos unified all shared libraries of IO module.

Marcos tried yet to solve a bug in Calc, with the help of Eike as mentor. This bug was about ODS files using link to another sheets. By changing the referenced files, Calc was not allowed to update the data inside the file that was referencing. But, this bug was not so easy, and the problem was bigger than we thought. So we couldn’t solve this bug in that time, and Eike removed the bug from the easy hacks.

And I was still working in static checker. I started to look to a bug of Math, about the user interface. After some work, I fixed that bug!

In the third day, we went back to Stephan’s place, trying to solve bugs and learn more! This day Bjoern went to Stephan’s house too, totaling six guys programming in the same table! In this day Marcos worked in a bug(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63020) indicated by Bjoern. That bug was related to removing a class from LibreOffice. With Stephan’s help, Marcos could remove that class and use a better approach in the code.

And in the last day, we went again to Eike’s home, where we enjoyed to last moments with the great developers of LibreOffice! We talked a little about their work and how they work daily.

Two rookies and three masters of LibreOffice

For sure, these days were very fruitful, and we learned a lot of things that we’ll use in the future.

We came back to Brazil and we want to say a big THANK YOU for all of you guys! To the  Brazilian community, that welcomed us and keeps helping us. To The Document Foundation, who gave us this opportunity. To all developers that are helping us since we started in the project, specially YOU we met this wonderful German journey, and all people involved directly or indirectly in this amazing project!

Open Document Editors Devroom at FOSDEM 2014

Open document editors are coming again to FOSDEM with a shared
devroom which gives every project in this area a chance to present
ODF related developments and innovations. The devroom is organized
by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

We invite submission of talks for the Open Document Editors devroom,
to be held on Saturday, February 1st, from 10AM to 6PM.

Length of talks should be limited to 20 minutes, as we would like to
have questions after each presentation, and to fit as many
presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be
explicitly requested and justified.

Technical talks (code, extensions, localization, QA, tools and
significant adoption related cases) about open document editors or
the ODF format are welcome.

Submissions must be done using the Pentabarf system:
https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM14 .

While filing your proposal, please add a few lines about yourself
(although your profile might already be stored at Pentabarf) and
specify what product or topic (Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice, both,
other editor, ODF in general…) your talk is about.

The deadline is Sunday, December 22, 2013. Accepted speakers
will be notified by January 5, 2014.

You can send any questions to the devroom mailing list:
office-devroom@lists.fosdem.org

LibreOffice Conference 2014 Call for Location

Once a year, the LibreOffice Community hosts its annual, global community event, the LibreOffice Conference. After a successful Paris event in October 2011, in Berlin in October 2012, and just shortly after the great 2013 Milano Conference, the venue for the upcoming year 2014 will be voted on by the community. Traditionally, the LibreOffice Conference takes place between September and November, with a preferred date of October.

The deadline for sending in your proposal is Sunday, December 29th 2013, 23:59 UTC.

After receiving the applications, we will evaluate necessary preconditions, evaluate the validity and give applicants the chance to clarify vague details. In January, the LibreOffice community will vote on their preferred location, so the organizers have enough time for their preparations. Please do not vote on random locations but rather wait for the official announcement of the proposals and the voting mechanism.

For details on the requirements, and the process, please refer to the wiki page on https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/CallforLocation

Again, the deadline is Sunday, December 29th 2013, 23:59 UTC.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN HOSTING THE LIBREOFFICE CONFERENCE!

LibreOffice Conference 2013 in Milan

Milan, September 9, 2013 – LibreOffice Conference will officially open in less than three weeks at the University of Milan, on Wednesday, September 25. The opening session will be held in the historic Ca’ Granda building, while all technical sessions and tracks will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science. The conference is sponsored by Canonical and Collabora, while Google and CloudOn sponsor the live hackatons happening on Wednesday and Thursday evening, and Lanedo the food for the breaks. The conference will close on Friday, September 27, with the traditional Q&A session, where project members can ask questions to the Board of Directors.

Tracks will cover the Open Document Format (ODF); LibreOffice Development; Community Development; Best Practices for Deployments and Migrations; and Building a Business with LibreOffice. For the first time during a conference, there will be a chance of sitting together with LibreOffice developers to hack the code, or just discuss the next feature.

“LibreOffice Conference comes to Italy at the right time, as during 2012 and 2013 there have been several migrations to LibreOffice in the public administrations, at regional and local level”, says Italo Vignoli, a member of the board of directors of The Document Foundation and the leader of the conference team. “Meeting with the project members will encourage other public administrations and enterprises to undertake the migration to LibreOffice”.

LibreOffice Conference 2013 is hosted by the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan (http://www.dsi.unimi.it/) and sponsored by Canonical (http://www.canonical.com) and Collabora (http://www.collabora.com), while Google (http://www.google.com) and CloudOn (http://site.cloudon.com/) sponsor the hackatons, and Lanedo (http://www.lanedo.com) the food for the breaks.

Conference sessions will be broadcasted online, and also recorded and made available on the conference website.

LibreOffice Conference – Registration is now open

In less than four weeks, the LibreOffice Conference 2013 will take place in Milan, Italy.
LibOCon is the global and annual event for the whole LibreOffice community and ecosystem, with creators, adopters and users meeting and gathering, exchanging ideas and thoughts. Dates are September 25-27 – see the conference site.

After the Call for Papers has been finished, we are currently working hard to prepare the schedule out of those many great proposals we have received.

In order to help the organizers with their plannings, we today ask you to register if you want to take part in this year’s conference. This helps us in estimating the amount of attendants and ensuring that enough capacities are available for everyone. We also need this information to send you last-minute updates via e-mail.

Registering is easy – just send an e-mail to

conference@libreoffice.org

and state:

  1. your first and last name
  2. your e-mail address
  3. your organization/affiliation, if applicable
  4. your IRC nickname, if you want

Participation at the conference will cost 10 € per person, payable directly at the venue, which helps the organizers in producing required material.

Looking forward to seeing you in Milan!

Call for Papers extended until August 22

From September 24 to 27, this year’s annual LibreOffice Conference takes place in Milano, Italy. It is the major annual event for all LibreOffice contributors, supporters, adopters and users, and will be jointly hosted by the Milan University together with the LibreOffice community.

We hereby announce that the Call for Papers will be extended until August 22, and invite all of you to send in your talk proposals for the conference.

Whether you’ve been developing cool and exciting features, are using LibreOffice in your corporation, or would like to talk about the OpenDocument format ecosystem at large, send in your talk and present it to a large and diverse audience at LibOCon 2013!

All details to the CfP are available at http://conference.libreoffice.org/2013/en/call-for-papers

Looking forward to your proposals!

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