In this lovely post I shall try to describe the bumpy road that got us brand new libreoffice ebuild.
\nCurrently we are preparing on unleashing the libreoffice 3.4 series into the calm waters of the testing land.
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\nEverything started with upstream, that moved away from the build repository to something called bootstrap which uses the autoconf and GNUmake with some parts still using dmake. This results in much nicer system where we can use plain econf and make commands.<\/p>\n
Even if this is really cool thing from upstream to do our ebuild accumulated so much cruft it was not exactly easy to update it, so I decided to start from scratch. This took place first in my dev overlay and when it started to compile at least under some occasions I moved the work to the main tree.<\/p>\n
Then the week of torture started where I just compiled and compiled and compiled with various options to see if it compiles and added various patches that made it do so (note that all patches were +- merged upstream or are on the way to be merged). Here I really have to thank to everyone trying to compile the beast even if it was changing under their hands. Quite great inspiration goes to geki’s unofficial overlay that has some features over the old in-tree ebuild and to archlinux pkgbuild file that was already migrated to new buildsystem so I used it as light inspiration. Another batch of suprises was unsplitting of all bundled libraries to use system libraries (with one expection you can find in ebuild :P).<\/p>\n
Brand new and shiny homepage for the office project<\/a> was created, along with the irc channel (#gentoo-office) to give realtime support. This was followed with fresh breeze in bugzilla where around 70 bugs were identified and cleaned resulting in just 40 open bugs. And this is pretty awesome!<\/p>\n At the same time I convinced Ian Whyman (gentoo recruit, sabayon dev) to bend the sabayon branding a bit so we get our own cool init screen and about dialog. Which of course is shiny enough for mention, but some people reported me that they see distorted image instead of the init screen. So if you have this version of libreoffice and happen to have such issue please open a bug.<\/p>\n Currently the 3.4.2.3 (which is called 3.4.2 release) is still hardmasked as we happen to have 2 more bugs to be fixed: On the saddest place in the office team now resides the binary package. We really need to do something with it rather sooner than later. Even you can help us with that by dropping by on the bug<\/a> and giving us your opinion and suggestions.<\/p>\n As an ending word please keep helping us with compiling the beast and report the bugs, as we can’t catch everything because it takes so damn long to compile it :)<\/p>\n
\n* parallel make issue<\/a>: this I attached a patch that should\/could fix it.
\n* translations issue<\/a>: this one we need to hack in ebuild as it will take some time to figure out upstream.<\/p>\n