Hi Per, *, On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Per Eriksson<pereriks...@openoffice.org> wrote: > > Having a building guide would simplify and make it easier for new developers > to find articles and getting to the right pages faster by providing the > navigation as in the developer guide.
I beg to differ. You don't need a guide. The people who try to build OOo and fail are those who don't bother to read instructions. Even a step-by-step instruction explicitly written to match their system wouldn't help in that case. But that's another story. > This work would be done by sorting, consolidating and editing the various > wiki pages into a guide with a structure. I dislike the idea to have a huge guide. > In this work various negative comments about building OpenOffice.org being > impossible in the articles will be replaced by constructive tips for the > developer. It never was complicated to build OOo on linux. Since aqua version is default, it is no longer complicated to build OOo on Mac OSX. The only problematic systems are Windows and other ports. The problem only arises because people are too lazy to read, always know better, don't even use the OOo build system / ignore warnings issued by configure / don't try a default build but in a "I do fancy tricks with the buildsystem stuff" way. The only noteworthy parts is * installing build requirements. (and there we're back at people being unable to read / unwilling to read configure output. See the many "why does the build want mingw" type of question. Configure states: Either get the prebuilt one from <url> or build using mingw. But people are unable to read and thus ask stupid questions on the IRC-channel. Or they disable the packaging component and then wonder why they don't get installable packages, but only files spread around in a directory. For linux (and also for the actual building part on Mac), the http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Building_OpenOffice.org IMHO is more than enough. (I dislike some of the recent edits though, like the swext "Hint" - that is more suitable for a "What if something goes wrong" page. In the build guide it just adds noise. Similar to other edits). So the new guide should focus on the OS-Specific parts. On Mac OSX that would be: Getting/installing XCode (and svn on 10.4), Where to obtain ccache. And: What do do if one doesn't want to use the prebuilt mozilla-zips, but build from scratch (the only case where one really needs to install third-party libs/packages) On Windows that would be: What compiler-version is suitable, and what to do when using the Personal edition, how to get cygwin running, what packages to install with cygwin, what other tools are needed. On Linux: Well, as mentioned above: The only thing you need are the (rather few) build-dependencies. Everyone who is attempting to build OOo should have at least compiled some other software anytime before. So they should be able to read configure output (i.e. tell from "install cups devel package" - don't nail me on the wording - that they need to install the corresponding packages their distribution provides libcups-devel cups-devel or whatever naming scheme the distro uses). There really aren't that many. The real guide then only is * run confiugre with appropriate options (with the suggestion to use --with-use-shell=bash) * point out prebuilt-mozilla/unowinreg.dll * source the environment file configure creates (again configure tells the user to do so, but users cannot read) * run "dmake" or "build --all" from instsetoo_native The rest is: How to make a parallel build How to reduce build time What do the configure options actually do (so what is the real effect of using that option on a high-level view) Getting the source-code and explanation of MWS/CWS probably should be on a seperate page so you can explain it in more detail without clobbering the build-instructions Probly this whole post can be summarized with: KISS ciao Christian --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@documentation.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@documentation.openoffice.org
