Hi Damjan,
AOO is by far the biggest and most complex code I have ever hacked on,
and I have many questions...
yes it is... :)
What IDE do you guys use to develop AOO? Eclipse CDT runs out of
memory indexing the code :-(.
I wouldn't try it this way...
Use dmake or maybe make (depends on the status of readiness regarding
using make) to build it. On Windows you could use VisualStudio to debug
it comfortly. On Linux you can use gdb and on Solaris you could use dbx
to start a debugging session. Don't try to leave the console...it's not
worth it...
Some building instructions including a document describing building
requirements can be found here:
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Building_Guide
Many comments are in German. Are translations to English welcome or
should we leave them as is?
German comments are present within code that hasn't been touched for a
long time. Remember: OOo/StarOffice has been originally developed in
Hamburg at StarDivision and most of the developers were German. But it's
better to have German comments within the source code than having no
comments...
Debugging is such a pain. Why do binaries get stripped when the tar.gz
is built even though debugging has been enabled (build debug=true
dbglevel=2 --all)?
Hint: If you want to run dbx or gdb then start to include gdb within the
command line of the soffice shell script to get the runtime environment
of the soffice binary.
The layout of the source code tree is incredibly complex, with eg.
confusing duplication of CSV parsing between binfilter/ and sc/. Is
there somewhere I should document the structure of various modules?
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Source_code_directories seems like a
good place to start but I would add a lot more detail.
Don't touch binfilter. It's somehow static and nowadays completely
deprecated.
Do you know http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture ?
Or this http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide ?
Searching with grep takes forever. I've tried indexing the source tree
with Lucene, but it doesn't find everything. Is there a better tool?
eg. OpenGrok at http://svn.services.openoffice.org/opengrok/ but be
aware that this instance is really old and I don't know a version that
has been updated recently and if someone at Apache Infra started to
build-up an equal environment so far...
Nice to read is also http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Development
Kind regards, Joost