My OOo Project - Making Master Pages Copyable

I have decided to work on the project that makes Master Pages copyable for the Impress application. I chose to work on this project because it requires C++ knowledge, which I feel I have a lot of, and Uno knowledge, which I don't even know what that means. While it might seem like a bad idea to take a project that I am not fully qualified for, I like the challenge and it seems as if a lot of projects require some knowledge of Uno, so maybe it will help me with fixing other open office bugs.

I decided to start learning about this project by first figuring out what Uno is, this lead me to this website explaining Uno, which lead me to the SDK. I then decided that it might be best to wait to talk to Thorsten so that I could get a better understanding of Uno and why do I need it for my project.

My next step was to go to Open Grok to search for Master Page functions that might be useful to me. I found this one which looked very interesting. The comments say that the function returns a copy of the master page being used in the current document. Of course that is only a header file, so I needed to find the actual "meat and potatoes" of that function. That wasn't too difficult to find.

My current idea on how to solve this bug is to use the function that I found to return a copy of the Master Page used in the current document. Then saving it to a temporary file, then when the user selects paste it then reads the file and puts all that information into the new documents Master Page. Of course this is easier said then done, and I will definitely need to discuss this with Thorsten before I get started.

DEV300M42 build

Late last night/earlier this morning I ran into this build error on build 42.

mkdir -p ../unxlngi6.pro/misc/install/fake-db-root
rpm --define "_builddir /home/bartosz/Desktop/DEV300_m42/setup_native/unxlngi6.pro/misc/install/fake-db-root" --define "_rpmdir /home/bartosz/Desktop/DEV300_m42/setup_native/unxlngi6.pro/bin" -bb fake-db.spec
-bb: unknown option
dmake: Error code 1, while making '../unxlngi6.pro/bin/noarch/fake-db-1.0-0.noarch.rpm'

ERROR: Error 65280 occurred while making /home/bartosz/Desktop/DEV300_m42/setup_native/scripts
rmdir /tmp/15952

I couldn't fix this error, so I went to the irc chat at #dev.openoffice.org, I got some help from someone named cloph. It appears that .configure doesn't check to see if rpm-build is installed. Since I installed Fedora and uninstalled Ubuntu over the reading week, I'm not surprised I missed some of the packages I needed to install. As of about 7:45 the build has been going strong, so I guess I'll find something else to work on until this is done/keep everyone updated on my progress.

10:48: Build Succesful. Milestone 42 seems much easier to build I dont know if its because I did it on Fedora instead of on Ubuntu, but this definitly doesn't get the NSS 3.10 error that everyone in my class seemed to have problems with.

Build SUCCESS!

Finally I completed my OOo_m40 build on the CDot computers. Now I just need to get it up and running on my local machine which I will work on after dinner. The problem I was having was solved by my classmate Daeson, he emailed me a patch he wrote to solve the error, unfortunatly when I tried the patch a part of it failed. I figured it was because I tried a variety of different patches from the internet that didn't solve my problem so I removed my current build and started again from scratch. My build still crashed in the same place, but at least now I knew I was only going to apply 1 patch instead of the 3 or 4 I tried earlier. After the patch was complete I attempted to build again but got an error saying that "dict-ru:: No such file or directory" I found the file in my filesystem so I tried building it again and it finally worked.

If anyone is still working on the build and crashes in the same spot as I did here is a link to Daeson's patch

OOo Still not Building

Well after trying for a couple days to build Open Office M40 I am still having problems. My last blog post talked about an error which was fixed pretty easily, turned out I was using the wrong -p number for the patch provided(-p0 should have been -p1). This error is a little trickier. Here is a pastebin of my CDot error.

I assume that the build should be close to completing once this bug is fixed since the build lasts a really long time, but I'm not 100% sure.

I am also building OOo M40 on my local machine, and that is going much worse then my build on the CDot computer. Here is a pastebin of the output of my make build.

Still Building

Well I finally had my problem of no disk space on the CDot computers sorted out, so I was able to begin building. Thus far the build hasn't treated me too badly and I've only ran into 1 problem that I haven't yet been able to solve. Luckily for me my classmate Daeson seemed to run into the same problem. Unfortunately his solutions didn't help me out, so I am waiting on irc for some help. The exact error message reads:

rpmbuild: /home/bbarcick/DEV300_m40/solver/300/unxlngx6.pro/lib/libnss3.so: version `NSS_3.10' not found (required by /usr/lib64/librpmio-4.6.so)
dmake:  Error code 1, while making '../unxlngx6.pro/bin/noarch/fake-db-1.0-0.noarch.rpm'

ERROR: Error 65280 occurred while making /home/bbarcick/DEV300_m40/setup_native/scripts
rmdir /tmp/26213
dmake:  Error code 1, while making 'build_instsetoo_native'

I guess while I wait I can start my Mac build. Hopefully that goes a little bit better

Building Open Office Attempt 1 of Many

I was attempting to build Open Office recently unfortunately it has not gone well, at least not yet. I tried building on one of the CDot computers, this did not work and I couldn't figure out why. To check out the source code I was using the nLogTime bash script that my professor Fardad provided so that I would know how long it took to complete the checkout. This script also takes the output and saves it into an output log. Unfortunatly when checking out I didn't check the output log. I assumed that any errors would still be shown on the screen, so no errors meant the svn must have finished checking everything out.

This did not happen, after hours of trying to figure out why my build didn't work I decided to check the output log and there was an svn error, which makes sense that I wasn't able to build it. The error said there was no more room on the device, so I tried working on another machine, I got the exact same error so I will have to look into that tomorrow when I am in school. If anyone else had this problem I would greatly appreciate if you told me how you fixed it.

Instead of waiting around I checked out the code on my local machine, and while the build seems to be working for now it sure is taking an extremly long time, mostly because I rarely boot into Ubuntu and I need to install a lot of different packages/updates. Hopefully I'll have it fully built on my home machine before Thursday night, and hopefully I can do the build on the CDot machines before Friday.

The Cathedral Builder

I was reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond and it got me thinking that in my years of schooling I have been trained to be a cathedral builder. Every thing we developed in school was something we worked on alone, or in small groups. We would even have competitions to see who could write better AI, when if we all worked together we could have easily written something that was not only better but something that would have taken a fraction of the time to write and debug.

The thing that stuck out to me the most in the reading was Linus' Law "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." This quote is very significant because of how true it is. Often times we look at code trying to debug it and miss bugs because we are reading what we expect to be there and not whats actually written there. Also, with how flexible coding is, having a lot of people staring at the code will produce many different ways of fixing the bug, one way would definitely be the easiest.

I also agreed with the part about how the open source software is so good because people do it because they genuinely like what they are doing. All the programs I write, if I am not into writing them then I'll do the bare minimum but if I am excited about a certain project I will not only do what is required, I will put even more effort into it to make it that much better.