Libreoffice 4.0 and other cool stuff

During the following week there will be hard feature freeze on libreoffice and 4.0 branch will be created. This means that we can finally start to do some sensible stuff, like testing it like hell in Gentoo.

This release is packed with new features so let me list at least some relevant to our Gentoo stuff:

  • repaired nsplugin interface (who the hell uses it :P) that was fixed by Stephan Bergmann for wich you ALL guys should sent him some cookies :-)
  • liblangtag direct po/mo usage that ensures easier translations usage because the translations are not converted in to internal sdf format
  • liborcus library debut which brings out some features from calc to nice small lib so anyone can reuse them, plus it is easier to maintain, cookies to Kohei Yoshida
  • bluetooth remote control that allows you to just mess with your presentations over bluetooth, also there is android remote app for that over network ;-)
  • telepathy colaboration framework inclusion that allows you to mess with mutiple other people on one document in semi-realtime manner (it is mostly tech preview and you don’t see what is the other guy doing, it just appears in the doc)
  • binfilter is gone! Which is awesome as it was huge load of code that was really stinky

For more changes you can just read the wiki article, just keep in mind that this wiki page will be updated until the release, so it does not contain all the stuff.

Build related stuff

  • We are going to require new library that allows us to parse mspub format. Fridrich Strba was obviously bored so he wrote yet another format parser :-)
  • Pdfimport is no longer pseudo-extension but it is directly built in with normal useflag, which saves quite a lot of copy&paste code and it looks like it operates faster now.
  • The openldap schema provider is now hard-required so you can use adresbooks (Mork driver handles that). I bet some of you lads wont like this much, but ldap itself does not have too much deps and it is usefull for quite few business cases.
  • There are also some nice removals, like glib and librsvg are goners from default reqs (no-suprise for gnomers that they will still need them). From other it no longer needs the sys-libs/db, which I finally removed from my system.
  • Gcc requirement was raised to 4.6, because otherwise boost acts like *censored* and I have better stuff to do than just fix it all the time.
  • Saxon buindling has been delt with and removed completely.
  • Paralel build is sorted out so it will use correct amount of cpus and will fork gcc only required times not n^n times.
  • And last but most probably worst, the plugin foundation that was in java is slowly migrating to python, and it needs python:3.3 or later. This did not make even me happy :-)

Other fancy libreoffice stuff

Michel Meeks is running merges against the Apache Openoffice so we try hard to get even fixes that are not in our codebase (thankfully allowed by license this way). So with lots of efforts we review all their code changes and try to merge it over into our implementation. This will grow more and more complex over a time, because in libo we actually try to use the new stuff like new C++ std/Boost/… so there are more and more collisions. Lets see how long it will be worth it (of course oneliners are easy to pick up :P).

What is going in stable?

We at last got libreoffice-3.6 and binary stable. After this there was found svg bug with librsvg (see above, its gone from 4.0) so the binaries will be rebuilt and next version bump will loose the svg useflag. This was caused by how I wrote the detection of new switches and overlook on my side, I simply tried to just launch the libreo with -svg and didn’t dig further. Other than that the whole package is production ready and there should not be much new regressions.

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3 Responses to Libreoffice 4.0 and other cool stuff

    • scarabeus says:

      Well that was not much of my choice, so given that nobody wanted to do those ifdefs and options it will have to stay. Btw it can link to any ldap provider in theory… so we can make it work on another one.

      • Flameeyes says:

        Is there another one at all? I suppose the alternative is making sure that the minimal USE flag on openldap really _is_ minimal. And maybe we could enable that by default on the desktop profiles.