I’m finally ready to announce LibreOffice daily builds for Linux that integrate our new automatic updater. The work on the automatic updater has been going on for nearly a year now and is finally in a shape that we produce builds on TDF hardware that will automatically update using delta updates.

The current builds are 64-bit Linux builds created on SLES 12.2 and should run on most Linux distros. These builds are .tar.gz based archives that you can extract and just run. Note that we can’t update builds that are placed into locations that are not writeable by the current user (and due to missing support for signing executables and libraries on Linux there are no plans to change that).

Below you will find a short summary how the updating works and some of my open items until this feature can be shipped in release builds (hopefully already in the next major release). If you are not interested in the technical details, head to the daily builds directory and download the build (currently the only way to see that an update happened is through the version string in About dialog but future builds will open my test wiki page after a successful build).

Technical details

Our updater code is heavily based on the Mozilla updater code and was initially imported into the LibreOffice build system as part of GSoC 2015.

The update files are called mar files and contain bzip2 compressed update files. In addition to the update files (either complete or delta updates) mar files also contain signatures, version info and update channel information. We currently only use the signature support to ensure that the update files are valid LibreOffice update files produced by us and the version info to make sure that nobody can do a downgrade.

The update process is currently a two step process but I might change this to single step process later. The first step currently contacts our update server that knows about all available updater enabled builds and will tell the LibreOffice instance which update files to use and provide some additional information. Based on the response the LibreOffice instance will download the update file, verify that the file is correct (file size and hash), copy the existing installation and apply the update in the update directory. After the update has been applied the first stage is complete and we need to wait until the next start to replace the running LibreOffice instance with the freshly updated one. During the next start the updated build in the update directory replaces the existing installation.

We currently use a two step process to ensure that we are not blocking the user too long as downloading a complete update file can take several minutes (about 200 MB compared to around 2 MB for my current delta files) and ensuring that if one of the steps fails we still have a working build. However, anyone who has ever developed complex code on Windows knows that Windows prohibits access to files that are already open by another process. Therefore this approach does not work on Windows and I think the two step process has some potential for user profile corruption if the user profile is stored in the installation directory (e.g. by default in our archive based builds). The long term plan is currently to switch to an update process that first downloads the update file and during the next start applies the update in-place. This approach would work on Windows and should avoid all potentials for user profile corruptions.

Another huge problem of the automatic updater is how to handle the case that the user can not write to the installation directory (e.g. installed as a normal application on Windows). Mozilla handles this case on Windows through an additional updater service that elevates the privileges of the updater process. Currently my plan is to use the same concept for LibreOffice and the code for the updater service already compiles successfully on Windows. Using such a service requires us to make sure that the service can not be used by any executable that is not produced by the LibreOffice team which requires signatures checks during each step. As I could not find a way to reliably sign executables and libraries on Linux there is currently no supported planned for this feature outside of Windows.

The updater seems to work reliably on Linux already and many of the basic features that I have on my list are already implemented. Currently the one remaining feature that I still need to implement for all platforms is some form of an UI. The larger task is to get the updater working well on Windows, including the updater service and the MSI integration through MSP updates. In addition, I would like to implement some automatic tests that make sure that updates work and that updated builds and freshly installed builds are identical.

If you want to help with the work on improving the automatic updater and making it available in our next major release please talk to me. A good starting point might be tdf#108563, a simple easy hack in the online updater code.

As always I have to thank all developers working on LibreOffice, the TDF infrastructure team which provides all the services that are used to produce the builds and especially the Mozilla team for providing an awesome solution as open source that we can easily integrate.

As you may know, The Document Foundation has a merchandise shop with clothing, accessories, phone/tablet covers and various other items. Many of the designs feature the LibreOffice logo on its own, but we thought we’d update the shop with some items that highlight the benefits of LibreOffice.

But given limited space, what benefit should really stand out?…

The post New items in our merchandise shop appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

• Mail chew; massaged priorities. Thrilled to see the great work from the team ship in Collabora Online 2.1.2 with avatars, and various other UI features; well worth an upgrade.

• Consultancy call, mail chew, built ESC agenda. Lunch. Commercial call; super hot - and 3x active building sites two next-door, and one across the road: wow.
• Worked lateish and got my hash to wire-id conversion working nicely in online; more efficient and more readable.

Woah, Google Summer of Code with LibreOffice ( x2 ). This time, I’ll be working on improvement and rework of Special Characters feature in LibreOffice and adding some enhancements to it. I will be mentored by Samuel Mehrbrodt, Thorsten Behrens, and Heiko Tietze. I’ll encapsulate all the proposed changes with respect to the project in this blog.

The Idea

• Create a way to quickly re-use recently-picked special characters, allowing the user to search in the whole character map, which has no filter to narrow down results.
• Allow users to create their own ‘Special Characters’ subset (Individualization)
• Sorting by last in, first out; items from the list of recently used characters are sorted to the beginning if selected.
• Create a toolbar dropdown control to easily access recent symbols and the user-defined custom subset.
• Have a preview along with the Unicode name.
• Better UI for search (within font subsets) using Unicode name, hex and decimal code.
• Different subsets within a font need a separation in the special character SvxShowCharSet custom widget.

Finalized enhancements for the dialog

Proposal for the toolbar dropdown for quick access to favorites and recently used characters.

Design for the toolbar dropdown.

A lot of challenges need to be addressed while working on this project. It’s about time to play with Unicode data and custom-widgets.

For other queries and discussions, please comment or ping me (IRC nick: Akki) on libreoffice-dev / libreoffice-design channel on Freenode.

• Mail chew, aborted team meeting; patch review, prodded leads. Lunch. Dug through older E-mail looking for gems. Partner call. Finally got around to de-bonging the online / slideshow unit test. Poked at a particularly fun unit test deadlock for good measure. Tried to unwind what is the same DNS lookup issue as this with unpleasant BT Home Hub. TDF board call.

• Birthday - 40th' today; a fine clutch of presents over a continental breakfast to enjoy with the family - they're such a blessing.
• Out to Louth Evangelical Church, good talk on Jesus' teaching's power to amaze & convict people from Mark 1:21-27 from Mark Plumb visiting from Huntingdon. Home for pizza lunch & more Spa'ing.
• Drove home; un-packed, stories for babes; movie, sleep.

• Up earlyish, out for a walk through the countryside around Louth; with the family - lovely; picnic lunch in a field. Back for a long swim together at the lodge Spa; lovely. Fine steak dinner, bed.

Due to its long history, LibreOffice has accumulated a staggering amount of features. Maintaining these features is not free, and having a massive amount of features may blur the focus of the software. In order to steer the development and to focus on the more important aspects we prepared a survey that investigates how often some features are used.…

The post Survey on LibreOffice features appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

I have spent the last weekend in Tirana, the capital city of Albania, with a group of young members of the local LibreOffice/FLOSS community – Anxhelo Lushka, Augest Dalliu, Greta Doci, Jona Azizaj, Kristi Progri, Mariana Balla, Marinela Gogo, Redon Skikuli, Sidorela Uku, Silva Arapi and Suela Palushi – for a LibreOffice Migration Workshop.

As everyone can see from the picture, the LibreOffice/FLOSS community in Albania is different from any other open source community, as it has a large majority of women: in fact, the workshop was attended by seven women – Greta, Jona, Kristi, Mariana, Marinela, Sidorela, Silva and Suela (plus another two or three for a few hours) – and three men: Anxhelo, Augest and Redon.…

The post LibreOffice Migration Workshop in Tirana appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

We asked recently for branding proposals for the upcoming release of LibreOffice. The task was also announced on the job board of the Open Source Design group and we got a couple of replies on their discourse forums. Below you we show the motifs embedded in the splash screen.…

The post What motif for the next release do you prefer? appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

The Document Foundation invites members and volunteers to submit proposals for papers for the conference in Roma. Whether you are a seasoned presenter or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice, we want to hear from you!

Proposals should be filed by August 15th, 2017 in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program.…

The post LibOCon 2017 Call for Papers appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

Having concluded our video interviews from FOSDEM, we now return to our regular LibreOffice contributor interviews on the blog. Today we talk to Daniel A. Rodriguez, an Argentinian LibreOffice and Free Software supporter, who helps with marketing, translations and design.

Where do you live, and are you active on social media?

I live in Posadas, the capital of Misiones in the north-east of Argentina.…

The post LibreOffice contributor interview: Daniel A. Rodriguez appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

I had to setup my website and my blog due to some issues again. I’ll restore the content manually during the next days.

This is the second part in our blog series about the LibreOffice QA (quality assurance) community – see here for the first part.

Regressions

During the six month period from 23 November 2016 to 21 May 2017, 553 bugs were identified as regressions by 61 people. This means a feature behaved correctly in the past – but a change in the code made it work incorrectly.…

The post LibreOffice Quality Assurance: six months in statistics (part 2) appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

Pivot chart field button actions

Figure 1: Pivot chart field filter

Improvements to pivot chart buttons

ODF support and compatibility

Tests

Final demo

Im deutschsprachigen LibreOffice-Projekt ist es bewährte Tradition, mindestens ein Projektwochenende im Jahr abzuhalten. Ort und Termin stehen nun fest: Wir treffen uns vom 23. bis 25. Juni in Berlin und eines der Hauptthemen wird LibreOffice online sein.

Dieses Jahr treffen wir uns von Freitagnachmittag, 23. Juni bis Sonntagmittag, 25. Juni in Berlin. Vielen Dank an Endocode für die Unterstützung!

Alle Details und die Anmeldemöglichkeit findest du auf der offiziellen Wiki-Seite und im Blogposting.

Wenn du Lust hast, in eines der großen Open-Source-Projekte hineinzuschnuppern, die „Macher“ hinter dem Programm kennen zu lernen und selbst bei uns mitzumachen, dann ist das die ideale Gelegenheit dazu! Ich freu mich auf dich!

Während der diesjährigen FOSDEM hat mein Kollege Mike Saunders viele Mitwirkende an LibreOffice zu ihren Beiträgen im Projekt interviewt. Ich freue mich sehr, dass ich mit ihm über meine Arbeit als Geschäftsführer der Stiftung The Document Foundation und meine Erlebnisse mit der Community sprechen durfte.

Das Video steht nun auch in deutscher Sprache online.

Ich hatte während der FOSDEM leider mit einer starken Erkältung zu kämpfen, hoffe aber, dass ich trotzdem verständlich bin.

(17-05-22) Pootle will undergo maintenance on Wednesday and thus translations.documentfoundation.org will not be available for translators for most of the day.

Margins specify the amount of space to leave between the edges of the page and the document text. You can define it for the left/inner, right/outer, top and bottom side individually. Page margins are defined by default at 0.79″ respectively 2cm on each side in LibreOffice Writer (located under Format > Page).…

The post Please participate in a survey about page margins appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

Just a quick heads up. I just created and saved an Excel file using Excel 2016, which cannot be opened again with it. Glad our swiss army knife LibreOffice can

It’s funny to see Excel can open the ODS I created using LibreOffice (as source I used the XLSX file) better than it’s “native” format….

Here is a short “proof” video: https://youtu.be/bM7UOkqQTqw

During this year’s FOSDEM, my colleague Mike Saunders has interviewed many LibreOffice contributors on their work and activities inside the project.

I’m proud of having been interviewed as well and I try to give some insight into my work as Executive Director of The Document Foundation.

Find the full video here.

I was heavily fighting with a flu during recording, but I hope I’m still understandable.

I currently looking into the theme development of WordPress. I already started with the work on a first version of a theme proposal for a local organisation in Duisburg. I’ll continue this work for the next weeks and it will consume a lot of my spare time.

Table styles have been introduced in LibreOffice Writer 5.3 as the successor to the AutoFormat feature. The table designs from this old feature were used as the initial set of table styles, so we asked on the design mailing list to submit proposals for new table designs and finally ran a survey to include the entire community in the process.…

The post Results from table styles survey appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development during their holiday break. The Document Foundation and LibreOffice participate every year, and we are happy to announce three accepted projects aimed to improve usability.…

The post Welcome, GSoC’17 students! appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

(17-05-03) Right now one of our internal routers has connectivity/routing issues. This causes problems with non-public-facing services not being reachable, and this includes various tinderboxes for CI use and intranet traffic used by jenkins. (So bottom line is that right now now gerrit builds are processed) We try to solve this issue with our hosting provider.

Nearly a year ago I wrote a blog post describing the LibreOffice crash reporting setup and how the crash reporting code works. Since then we have released two minor versions with the crash reporter enabled (5.2 and 5.3) including many bug fix releases and release candidates. According to the crash reporting server a total of 27 versions are recognized and it is time to list some of the statistics surrounding the crash reporter.

During the one year of operation we had about 900,000 uploaded crash reports with around 152,000 of them reported in the last 30 days. The number of crash reports might sound like a lot, but a huge amount (around 430,000) have been reported for the 5.2.4.2 release. We introduced a regression in the shutdown code during the 5.2.4.2 development window which resulted in a crash if the clipboard was not empty during shutdown. Due to the crash reporter we were able to fix the crash quickly and release a fixed 5.2.5 version ahead of schedule. Without the crash reporter we would not have noticed the problem that quickly.

During the early 5.3 releases we saw a spike of random crashes in the window generation code that we could not really explain. After some careful analysis, it was concluded that these crashes happen as a result of GDI resource leaks. Amazingly, on windows you are only able to hold references to 10,000 GDI handles (fonts, bitmaps, …). Some of the GDI leaks have been fixed ([1], [2]) already but we are still chasing some more. At the time of writing, running out of GDI handles is still the number one source of crashes in the 5.3 releases. In an attempt to make it easier to spot these crashes the number of open GDI handles are now reported as part of the metadata by the crash reporter (example in a recent 5.3.2.2 crash). Starting with the 5.3 release the metadata also contains the localization of the installation as we found a few crashes that appear to be locale dependent.

As the transformation from a stack and memory dump to a human readable stacktrace happens on the server we need symbol information to map stack information to source code files, method names and line numbers. These symbol information currently occupy 97GB of data on the server with many of the symbol information being for system libraries. Despite this large amount of symbol information we have still recorded around 100,000 libraries without associated symbol information. These range from system libraries without corresponding debug information, libraries for multimedia codecs, OpenGL and OpenCL drivers to antivirus solutions that inject code into LibreOffice. As part of the symbolization we received around 11,000 different signatures for crash reports. However many of them are actually crashes caused by the same problem and just crash in different places. As an example the 5.2.4.2 crash during shutdown is known with many dozens if not even hundreds of different crash signatures.

Additionally, 179 bug reports have been connected to the crash reporter and 42 commits to the LibreOffice master branch reference the crash reporter. Most of these are attempts to fix reported crashes. Sadly we don’t have a common way to reference the crash reporter yet so there are surely more commits that I could not find with a quick search.

With the next minor release (5.4), it is expected that the Linux version of our signal handler allows crash report generation even when the LibreOffice signal handler overwrites our crash reporting signal handler. All in all the crash reporter works amazingly well and we have been able to fix a number of of serious crashes already. With more time we hope to be able to fix more of the reported crashes and therefore improve the quality of LibreOffice even more.

As always, help in fixing and researching some of the reported crashes is highly appreciated. Especially the more obscure crash reports require detective work to trace them back to their cause.

Additionally help with the crash reporting server is always welcome. The server is written in python with django and some javascript. No C++ or LibreOffice code knowledge required

Meine Freizeit in den letzten Wochen habe ich häufig dazu genutzt, eine Anleitung für das Erstellen von LibreOffice Extensions (Erweiterungen) zu schreiben. Eine erste Version dieser Anleitung, die zunächst die grundsätzliche Struktur und den Bau von Extensions behandelt, die weitere Inhalte LibreOffice hinzufügen, beispielsweise weitere Vorlagen oder AutoTexte (Textbausteine). Die Anleitung wird in den nächsten Wochen um weitere Abschnitte ergänzt werden. Sie können die erste Version von meiner Homepage hier  herunterladen. Die Anleitung steht unter der Creative Commons Lizenz 4.0 ohne kommerzielle Nutzung.

It has been quite some time since the last cppunit release – about 3.5 years according to wikipedia – despite having enough changes for quite some time. After seeing some recent LibreOffice commits that would have benefited from the existing unreleased commits I finished the work. Here is a short summary of the changes to cppunit 1.14:

Removed features and platform support

• Removed special support for BeOS
• Removed QT test runner
• Removed MSVC6 test runner
• Removed MSVC6 plugin
• Removed support for pre-C++11 compilers
• Removed support for compilers that don’t support RTTI and default template arguments in standard containers

New features

• Support for enum class in template<typename T> CppUnit::assertEquals, and therefore in CPPUNIT_ASSERT_EQUAL
  • An example can be found in the internal examples directory
• New assertion macros: CPPUNIT_ASSERT_LESS, CPPUNIT_ASSERT_GREATER, CPPUNIT_ASSERT_LESSEQUAL, CPPUNIT_ASSERT_GREATEREQUAL
  • Examples for the new assertion macros can be found in the internal examples directory
  • Note that the first argument is always the reference value, so CPPUNIT_ASSERT_LESS(x, y) will check that y is less than x. Sadly this confusing behavior is required to keep compatibility with CPPUNIT_ASSERT_EQUAL.
• TestCaller now takes as a constructor argument any callable that can be put into std::function<void()>
• Based on the TestCaller change, CPPUNIT_TEST_PARAMETERIZED has been added that works similar to CPPUNIT_TEST but takes as a second argument an iteratable whose items can be passed to the test function. std::bind of the test method with each element of the iteratable needs to result in an object that can be stored in std::function<void()>.
  • An example can be seen in the examples directory.
• Various warning and bug fixes
• New and improved build system (thanks to Tomas Chvatal and David Tardon)

With the removal of the old features the code now much smaller and the next release will most likely move into the directory of modernizing the code base. Thanks to all contributors who provided patches for this release.

As always bug reports are welcome at the LibreOffice bug tracker.