Behind the scenes at TDF: infrastructure

The year 2015 brought some challenging and exciting developments regarding the ongoing restructuring of our infrastructure. At the beginning of the year, the migration of our existing virtual machines and bare metal machines was ongoing after an extensive test phase of the new virtualization platform. This virtualization platform consists of three servers, each with 256GB RAM, 64 CPU cores and quite a lot of hard drive space. One of the machines is meant to be used exclusively by developers for crash testing. These machines are all hosted by manitu in St. Wendel, Germany, and are currently undergoing migration onto our own dedicated 42U rack – including the flexibility to set up a private network between these machines and others that we house there. After some problems with the software previously chosen for our virtualization platform, much work went into setting up virtual machines where services run isolated from each other, based on plain KVM. This already led to the transition of the hosted blog to one of our own machines, which give us more control over installed plugins, and also provides more flexible control over the WordPress setup that we use. During the Hackfest at the University of Gran Canaria,

200,000 thanks

We’ve received 200,000 donations in 1030 days, from May 1st 2013 to February 24th 2016, with an average of 194 donations per day. The best day was February 11th 2016 – the day after we announced LibreOffice 5.1 – with 474 donations. Together with volunteers who are contributing their time, and Advisory Board members who are investing in The Document Foundation, individual donors are making the dream of an independent self-sustaining free software-oriented foundation – capable of pushing the best free office suite to the next level of awesomeness – into a solid, enduring reality. Back in 2010, when the independent foundation was announced, one of the most frequent objections was based on the assumption that a large free software project cannot exist without a single large corporate sponsor. After five and a half years, the dream has come true and has a bright future. Thanks to donations, we have been able to fund a large number of projects, from hackfests for developers to LibreOffice booths at exhibitions, along with native language community events, a stronger independent infrastructure, and so on. In addition, our staff is growing, taking care of background activities, and making things happen. More importantly, we have

Behind the scenes at TDF: Release Engineering

LibreOffice proper The year 2015 started off with LibreOffice 4.4.0 and 4.3.6 rc1 – only the first of a whopping 42 (of course!) tags that were created and for which a build was uploaded to our mirror network – and ends with the stable releases 4.4.7 and 5.0.4 and with the first RC for LibreOffice 5.1.0 (for those interested: that’s a total of 216GB for the binary builds). This constant stream of builds allows our volunteer testers to always stay on top, not waste time with testing stuff only to find out a fix has already been checked in weeks ago. But even the constant stream of full builds sometimes is not recent enough. Daily builds provided by various tinderboxes fill this gap. Not only do they constantly monitor the buildability of all current branches (and nag committers in case our continuous integration platform didn’t catch the problem before it ended up in the code), many also provide one installationset per day. That way users don’t have to fiddle with building LibreOffice themselves, but still can run the current code. We also changed our release baseline: • since LibreOffice 4.4 we require Mac OS X 10.8 or later and dropped

Behind the scenes at TDF: NLP/L10n

LibOCon in Aarhus, Denmark, has been a really nice meeting especially for the L10n/NLP communities with a large workshop on the day before the opening of the conference. Even the whole afternoon was too short to discuss all the topics we had on the agenda. Around 40 persons from all over the world were attending the meeting. We have shared experiences and feedback, Christian has explained the new workflow with master and how branching is managed, and discussed some Pootle enhancements as well as other enhancements on coordination. At the end of the meeting we discussed a specific issue with accelerators that are broken in some languages and specifically in languages using complex script layouts. This has led Niklas Johansson to develop a tool that detects duplicate use of accelerator keys in menus. This tool is of great help for all of us, translators, but also for our users and even more when accessibility matters. Thanks so much Niklas for this! If you missed the conference, you’ll find all the videos of the talks on the TDF channel [1], there has been a whole track about localization, migrations and marketing. Italo has also organized marketing workshops dedicated to NLPs. As

Program of Events at LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus

The organizing committee has published the calendar of events at the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/events/. On Tuesday, September 22nd, there will be a Community Dinner at Restaurant Flammen: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/events/community-dinner/. On Wednesday, September 23rd, there will be a Conference Dinner at Restaurant Bone’s: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/events/wednesday-dinner/. On Thursday, September 24, there will be a HackFest & Party at the Aarhus University: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/events/hack-fest-and-party/. To better organize the three events, all interested conference participants are kindly requested to register using the form that can be found in each event page. Only people registered will have access to the events in Aarhus.

Extension of TDF Freelance Job Opening (#201507-01) – Development Mentoring Lead

The Document Foundation hereby extends the TDF Freelance Job Opening (#201507-01) – Development Mentoring Lead The new deadline for applications is September 24, midnight UTC. TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including curriculum vitae, your financial expectations, and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG. Find the role description below: The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks a Development Mentoring Lead to start work as soon as possible. The role, which is scheduled for 20 hours a week, includes amongst other items: Helping new contributors to get started with LibreOffice code including: building LibreOffice getting started with patch submittal on gerrit patrol bugzilla, github and mailing lists for patches uploaded there and help author to upload to gerrit proper clarifying beginner tasks (Easy Hacks) and connecting beginners with domain experts manage, update and watch the list of beginner tasks select attractive beginner tasks and promote, share and advertise those together with other TDF staff, manage quick access to TDF cloud resources for developers (see: Anytime Builder VMs for Developers and Using a VM) Talking to people