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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

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.1.3

Berlin, November 1st, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.1.3, for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This is the third minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features with proprietary and legacy file formats.

The new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. For enterprise adoptions, The Document Foundation suggests LibreOffice 4.0.6, supported by certified professionals.

LibreOffice 4.1.3 arrives just one day before the LibreOffice HackFest in Freiburg, Germany (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Freiburg2013), where the community will gather at the ArTik to get started on EasyHacks under the mentoring of experienced certified developers such as Thorsten Behrens, Eilidh McAdam, Bjoern Michaelsen, Markus Mohrhard, Eike Rathke and Michael Stahl.

LibreOffice 4.1.3 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.3/RC1 (fixed in 4.1.3.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.3/RC2 (fixed in 4.1.3.2).

About The Document Foundation (TDF)

The Document Foundation is an open, independent, self-governing, meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite ever. TDF is open to any individual who agrees with its core values and contributes to its activities, and welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community. As of October 1st, 2013, TDF has 170 members and well over 3.000 volunteers and contributors worldwide.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.6

Berlin, October 24, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.6, for Windows, OS X and Linux, the sixth and probably last minor release of the LibreOffice 4.0 family, targeted to corporate deployments – when backed by professional support – and conservative users.

LibreOffice 4.0.6 solves almost 70 bugs and regressions over the previous release, thanks to the work of an increasing number of QA volunteers.

LibreOffice 4.0.6 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.6/RC1 (fixed in 4.0.6.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.6/RC2 (fixed in 4.0.6.2).

LibreOffice 4.0.6 is not meant to be adopted by users of the more advanced LibreOffice 4.1.x family, which offers additional features. LibreOffice 4.1.3 will be announced soon.

TDF Board Elections

Dear Community,

we hereby officially announce the upcoming elections for the next Board of Directors of The Document Foundation.

As per § 7 II of our statues, [1] the Board’s term lasts two years. The Document Foundation has been formally incorporated on February 17, 2012, at which day the current Board of Directors officially was set in place. Therefore, the old board remains in charge until the end of February 17, 2014, so the new board will be in charge the day after that, which is February 18, 2014.

As per § 6 III, only members of the Board of Trustees of The Document Foundation, as well as current members of any of its bodies, are eligible to be elected into the Board of Directors, and the election is overseen by the Membership Comittee (§ 7 II).

The active electoral right is reserved to those who have been members of the Board of Trustees before this announcement (§ 7 II).

§ 6 III also states that members of the Board of Directors or their deputies may not be members of the Membership Committee and vice versa. This means that current members of the Membership Committee are eligible to the elected, but would have to step down from the Membership Committee the minute before accepting to become a member of the Board of Directors.

There is one more notable limitation: Per § 8 IV of the statutes, a maximum of 1/3 members of the Board of Directors is allowed to work on an employment basis for the same company, organization, entities, affiliates or subdivisions.

Nomination of candidates fulfilling the above requirements, as well as self nomination is welcome. In total, at least seven Board of Directors members are required, and given there are enough candidates, up to three deputies can be elected (§ 7 II).

Re-election of current members of the Board of Directors is explicitly permitted (§ 7 II).

Please send nominations and self-nominations via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private) and also (!) to board-discuss@documentfoundation.org (which is a public mailing list). We kindly ask nominees who would like to stand for elections to provide a 75 words statement on their candidacy as continuous text (so no bullet lists or multiple paragraphs). In addition, please also provide your full name, e-mail address and your corporate affiliation, if any.

Discussions with the candidates and questions to them as well as questions about the elections should take place on the public board-discuss@documentfoundation.org mailing list. For details on how to use the mailing list, see http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/

Eligible voters will receive further details via e-mail prior to the start of elections, including a summary of the candidates, details on how to access the voting system, and instructions on how to independently verify the vote count. Please ensure the Membership Committee has your recent and correct e-mail address on file. For questions, you can reach the Membership Committee in private at elections@documentfoundation.org

Following the timeline set forth in § 7 II, requiring a 45 day advance notice, we hereby announce the following timeline for the elections:

  1. 2013-10-23: announcement of the elections (this e-mail); and start of the nomination phase
  2. 2013-12-02, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the nomination phase (one week before the election starts, as per § 7 II)
  3. 2013-12-10, 00:00 CET/UTC+1: official start of the elections (at least 45 days after #1, as per § 7 II)
  4. 2013-12-17, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the elections
  5. 2013-12-18: announcement of the preliminary results
  6. 2013-12-19, 00:00 CET/UTC+1: start of the challenging phase
  7. 2013-12-23, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the challenging phase
  8. afterwards: official announcement of the final results

Be advised that the newly elected Board of Directors will only be in charge beginning from February 18, 2014. The current Board of Directors will however include them in the decision making process, to easen up the transition.

Challenges to this announcement with respect to the deadlines outlined have to happen no later than seven (7) days after this announcement, via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private).

Challenges to the preliminary results of the election have to happen until the deadline set forth above, via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private).

On behalf of the Membership Committee,
Eike Rathke, Chairman of the Membership Committee

[1] http://www.documentfoundation.org/satzung.pdf (binding version) and http://www.documentfoundation.org/statutes.pdf (non-binding translation)

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!

Press Releases

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