
Why I love hacking at LibreOffice - davidgerard
http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2016/01/why-i-love-hacking-at-libreoffice.html
======
chris_wot
Oh! I wasn't expecting this to get onto HN :-)

If anyone wants to contribute to LibreOffice, hope onto Freenode #libreoffice-
dev and say hi :-) it's a massive project, but there are bite sized projects
that you can tackle, and even if you struggle at first nobody will mind. It's
a fun project, so give it a try!

Any Australians in Sydney who might be interested in hacking at LO, let me
know!

~~~
keithpeter
Well done all of you, I use your work every day.

Please, please be _very_ conservative with UI changes.

~~~
chris_wot
Late reply: thanks :-)

I'm certain the design team are being very careful in the changes they are
making to the UI.

The design team's page can be found here:

[https://www.libreoffice.org/community/design/](https://www.libreoffice.org/community/design/)

Their blog can be found here:

[https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org](https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org)

------
tcopeland
> the incremental improvements have been increasing at a rate of knots and
> folks are beginning to notice the positive effects

Right on. I see this at $DAY_JOB too; after a certain amount of cleanup and
dead code deletion and whatnot suddenly things start getting implemented
faster, small bugs are fixed more easily, TODOs and FIXMEs start disappearing
from the codebase, etc. Good stuff!

------
Yhippa
I had to install LibreOffice recently to generate some forms and PDFs and I
was very impressed. It's come a long way since I last messed with it several
years ago. Makes me want to contribute but it's been way too long since I last
touched C++ and I'm mostly a Java developer now.

~~~
buovjaga
If you are also comfortable with Python, you could help with this task of
converting unit tests from Java to Python:
[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/GetInvolved/...](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/GetInvolved/DeveloperStepByStep/javapython)

------
PeterWhittaker
tl;dr? The people. The author indicates that the LibreOffice community is
filled with people of good humour who help those not as expert as themselves.

------
grandinj
I love hacking on LibreOffice because nobody else lets me do static analysis
on 10 million lines of code and make it better. Most places just throw up
their hands in despair and become too afraid to touch anything.

Also, the people are great!

------
davidgerard
I'm the guy Chris mentioned who noted 5.0 feeling noticeably faster than 4.4
(because they cleaned up the VCL timers) and how fascinating the details of a
project doing an apparently-boring job can be :-)

~~~
chris_wot
You are seriously our biggest fan :-)

------
ape4
Its a pretty important project.

------
dfrankow
I wonder what the simplest changes to the codebase are that would make it much
smaller. I wonder if there are tools that would make suggestions.

~~~
dfrankow
A detailed post related to this:
[https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2013-06-13-under-
the-...](https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2013-06-13-under-the-
hood.html)

~~~
buovjaga
More:

[https://www.gnome.org//~michael/blog/2014-01-30-under-the-
ho...](https://www.gnome.org//~michael/blog/2014-01-30-under-the-hood.html)

[https://www.gnome.org//~michael/blog/2014-07-29-under-the-
ho...](https://www.gnome.org//~michael/blog/2014-07-29-under-the-
hood-4-3.html)

[https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-
the-...](https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-the-
hood-4-4.html)

[https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-
the-...](https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the-
hood-5-0.html)

Keep an eye on 5.1 as well :)
[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan/5.1](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan/5.1)

------
elcapitan
For people who want to get involved, is there a list of starting points? (like
low hanging fruit type of tickets to get into the codebase)

~~~
dfrankow
[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks)

------
systems
what programming languages do i need to know to hack on libreoffice?

~~~
luch
Mostly C++ and a string search utility (like grep) since the codebase is
massive. There are others languages (I recall Java and Perl) but their use are
marginal.

~~~
buovjaga
Python is used as well:
[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Python_Unit_...](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Python_Unit_Tests)

Web developers and sysadmins are also most welcome!

[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Website](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Website)

[https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Infra/AdminTeam](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Infra/AdminTeam)

