The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
CyricZ
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
rdwald
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.
I guess that's why it takes 5 hours to compile in Gentoo, then. I wish I were exaggerating.
Not really "new" news
by
Petrushka
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Er... this happened a week ago. Good news, to be sure, though.
Note: OOo 1.1.5 can import OpenDocument files, but not export them.
By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me.
Back to OOo 1.1.5
by
vanka
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
Kjella
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Lots of people are ready. The users don't want to.
-- Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
2.0 Beta For MS Files
by
kg4gyt
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I've found that 2.0 Beta has very few bugs, from what I've seen, almost the same beta that gmail is still beta. But anyways, OOo 2.0 Beta seems to handle the microsoft documents extremly well. Well worth the download.
Re:Version 1.1.5?
by
HUADPE
·
· Score: 5, Informative
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a beta. 1.1.5 is the stable release. The beta is not supposed to be for general consumption, it is a prototype which may have bugs and be unstable.
-- This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
And is also its Achilles heel.
by
soullessbastard
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
As someone who's wrangled with the OOo build system since 2001, I have to respectfully disagree. While it is good that it supports so many different operating systems, the build system is also one of the major Achilles heels of OOo. Some examples:
It builds its own build tools as part of its bootstrapping process. This makes it near impossible to cross-compile without completely retooling the build system (a pain for doing any type of single-machine PPC & x86 OS X builds).
It has its own "make" equivalent that encodes module dependencies and language localizations in a custom format. To add appropriate dependencies you need to learn yet another makefile system. Don't mention trying to figure out the module build order without actually running a compile. Try it sometime if you want to lose your mind.
It uses quite a few preprocessing tools for custom file formats for processing including slots files, IDL files that generate more headers, resource compilers, and more. Custom toolchains make figuring out what generated what file even more fun to discover.
Some of the build tools have dependencies on versions of Java that do not exist on all the platforms on which the application might be able to run, preventing it from even compiling on those platforms.
The end result of all of this is that the entire 8 million line plus project is quite dependent on its build system in order to successfully compile. The system is so intricate that most all of the attempts to move it to a different system, such as XCode, have failed. This is a bummer. From a Mac perspective, it sucks ass to be forced to use command line tools for such a huge project. You lose access to such useful tools as the symbolic browser information (e.g. "Jump to Definition" for a symbol in an editor file) and within-project searches. Not to mention you don't gain access to other nice things in the environment like distributed compiles. Probably the worst side effect, however, is that most Mac developers aren't command-line junkies (unless they were MPW freaks like me). They've been raised on CodeWarrior and other great IDEs. It's a real turn-off to have to learn an arcane command line build system that is used for only one program and will probably not give you any useful skills for any other applications on the Mac platform. Forget about being able to examine the interface in InterfaceBuilder or ResEdit, too.
The whole complexity of learning the build system and all of the custom formats involved has been a real turn-off for many a Mac developer who just take a look at the build instructions and vomit. The lack of standard dev tools has definitely hindered my productivity, and I'm sure I'm not alone. A fantastic build system is one that doesn't get in a developer's way and on Macs at least, that's most definitely not the case.
ed
OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
Spoing
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I need help.
I have a good chance to include the OpenOffice format (specifically, a reference to the Oasis Open Document specification), as part of a specification for a US Federal Government system. The current specification includes MS Office formats as acceptable document formats for reports, etc...and OpenDocument would be inserted along with MS Office as an acceptable report format. This specification will be the basis for a few more related specifications.
What I need are references to other US federal (preferred), US state/local, or non-US government use of OpenOffice (the app) or OpenDocument (the Oasis document standard). The higher profile the better.
So far, I've scraped up a couple references but not enough to make a simple and direct case for the inclusion of OpenDocument. (The practical and technical benifits are not always a good argument to make...who's using what seems to be more effective.)
-- A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
soullessbastard
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size? Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out? This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code. Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long. gcc4 may spit out a warning at you, but it'll still be valid C.
I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...I almost can fathom spreadsheets, but really the unsigned int row index will bite you in the ass *waaay* before a 2GB per process memory limit:)
ed
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
soullessbastard
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Yes, there are some folks rethinking the standard interfaces...such as Apple (with Keynote and Pages) and even Microsoft with Office 12 and earlier some of the UI design of Office:mac. On some platforms, it would even be possible to play around with alternative OOo interfaces by using OfficeBean (although I don't know of any off of the top of my head).
For office suites, however, I think the general interface paradigms are so commonplace now that any radical departure will be greeting by a nice resounding "WTF is this" from users. Case in point: OpenDoc. It was, in my opinion, a valiant attempt at shifting the focus for productivity suites off of individual applications and onto a free-form content-centric view. The idea never caught on with users, and ones I always saw trying to use it were just confused by the idea and were still asking questions like "what do I open to create a spreadsheet?".
Not to mention I can't get that stupid "I just did the Excel..." lady from the Video Professor commercial out of my head. With millions of users like that, I doubt things will really be able to change that much:)
ed
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
linguae
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
I would love to have a new, innovative, word processing software, spreadsheet software, and presentation software (although I use LaTeX and text editors for the former, so I'm not much of a word processor user anymore). However, OpenOffice's goal was never to become an innovative office suite (in the sense of revolutionizing word processors like Apple's Pages (or even LyX for that matter), revolutionizing spreadsheets like Lotus Improv, and presentations like Apple Keynote); it's goal was to provide 90% of MS Office's features and interface at a much lower price: free (as in beer and as in speech). And it does a decent job of doing that if you just can't afford MS Office (and, in some instances, a Windows or Mac OS license). I use OpenOffice on my computer. Even though I don't use it too often (I have been indoctrinated^Wintroduced to LaTeX, and don't have a need for spreadsheets and presentations [LaTeX can handle presentations, too]), I keep OpenOffice on my machine just in case I must work with MS Office documents.
OpenOffice is a very nice, pragmatic software project used for a free alternative to MS Office. OpenOffice isn't perfect and I actually prefer MS Office to OpenOffice for a few reasons (faster loading is the main key), but it is the no-cost solution to dealing with the MS world out there. OpenOffice didn't set out to become a revolutionary, innovative project. OpenOffice is an example of a program that tries to do a job that a $300+ program does, except offered for free.
Re:Sweet!
by
abandonment
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I've been very pleased with the stability, performance and featureset of the open office 2 beta - we've been using it internally for a month or so and it is miles better than the current 1.x codebase.
you might look into trying it out - it might be a 'beta' but it's been very stable on our range of machines - we don't open any massive sized files like what you are looking for, and for that matter i haven't tried out the db side of the new release, but overall it's worth looking into if you are simply trying to open & examine large files.
oh, and i seem to recall that the max rows limit was increased in the 2.x oo spreadsheet app as well, but can't remember how much...
Slashdot Mirror
The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Er ... this happened a week ago. Good news, to be sure, though.
Note: OOo 1.1.5 can import OpenDocument files, but not export them.
By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me.
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Lots of people are ready. The users don't want to.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've found that 2.0 Beta has very few bugs, from what I've seen, almost the same beta that gmail is still beta. But anyways, OOo 2.0 Beta seems to handle the microsoft documents extremly well. Well worth the download.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a beta. 1.1.5 is the stable release. The beta is not supposed to be for general consumption, it is a prototype which may have bugs and be unstable.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
As someone who's wrangled with the OOo build system since 2001, I have to respectfully disagree. While it is good that it supports so many different operating systems, the build system is also one of the major Achilles heels of OOo. Some examples:
The end result of all of this is that the entire 8 million line plus project is quite dependent on its build system in order to successfully compile. The system is so intricate that most all of the attempts to move it to a different system, such as XCode, have failed. This is a bummer. From a Mac perspective, it sucks ass to be forced to use command line tools for such a huge project. You lose access to such useful tools as the symbolic browser information (e.g. "Jump to Definition" for a symbol in an editor file) and within-project searches. Not to mention you don't gain access to other nice things in the environment like distributed compiles. Probably the worst side effect, however, is that most Mac developers aren't command-line junkies (unless they were MPW freaks like me). They've been raised on CodeWarrior and other great IDEs. It's a real turn-off to have to learn an arcane command line build system that is used for only one program and will probably not give you any useful skills for any other applications on the Mac platform. Forget about being able to examine the interface in InterfaceBuilder or ResEdit, too.
The whole complexity of learning the build system and all of the custom formats involved has been a real turn-off for many a Mac developer who just take a look at the build instructions and vomit. The lack of standard dev tools has definitely hindered my productivity, and I'm sure I'm not alone. A fantastic build system is one that doesn't get in a developer's way and on Macs at least, that's most definitely not the case.
ed
I have a good chance to include the OpenOffice format (specifically, a reference to the Oasis Open Document specification), as part of a specification for a US Federal Government system. The current specification includes MS Office formats as acceptable document formats for reports, etc...and OpenDocument would be inserted along with MS Office as an acceptable report format. This specification will be the basis for a few more related specifications.
What I need are references to other US federal (preferred), US state/local, or non-US government use of OpenOffice (the app) or OpenDocument (the Oasis document standard). The higher profile the better.
So far, I've scraped up a couple references but not enough to make a simple and direct case for the inclusion of OpenDocument. (The practical and technical benifits are not always a good argument to make...who's using what seems to be more effective.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size? Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out? This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code. Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long. gcc4 may spit out a warning at you, but it'll still be valid C.
I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...I almost can fathom spreadsheets, but really the unsigned int row index will bite you in the ass *waaay* before a 2GB per process memory limit :)
ed
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Yes, there are some folks rethinking the standard interfaces...such as Apple (with Keynote and Pages) and even Microsoft with Office 12 and earlier some of the UI design of Office:mac. On some platforms, it would even be possible to play around with alternative OOo interfaces by using OfficeBean (although I don't know of any off of the top of my head).
For office suites, however, I think the general interface paradigms are so commonplace now that any radical departure will be greeting by a nice resounding "WTF is this" from users. Case in point: OpenDoc. It was, in my opinion, a valiant attempt at shifting the focus for productivity suites off of individual applications and onto a free-form content-centric view. The idea never caught on with users, and ones I always saw trying to use it were just confused by the idea and were still asking questions like "what do I open to create a spreadsheet?".
Not to mention I can't get that stupid "I just did the Excel..." lady from the Video Professor commercial out of my head. With millions of users like that, I doubt things will really be able to change that much :)
ed
I would love to have a new, innovative, word processing software, spreadsheet software, and presentation software (although I use LaTeX and text editors for the former, so I'm not much of a word processor user anymore). However, OpenOffice's goal was never to become an innovative office suite (in the sense of revolutionizing word processors like Apple's Pages (or even LyX for that matter), revolutionizing spreadsheets like Lotus Improv, and presentations like Apple Keynote); it's goal was to provide 90% of MS Office's features and interface at a much lower price: free (as in beer and as in speech). And it does a decent job of doing that if you just can't afford MS Office (and, in some instances, a Windows or Mac OS license). I use OpenOffice on my computer. Even though I don't use it too often (I have been indoctrinated^Wintroduced to LaTeX, and don't have a need for spreadsheets and presentations [LaTeX can handle presentations, too]), I keep OpenOffice on my machine just in case I must work with MS Office documents.
OpenOffice is a very nice, pragmatic software project used for a free alternative to MS Office. OpenOffice isn't perfect and I actually prefer MS Office to OpenOffice for a few reasons (faster loading is the main key), but it is the no-cost solution to dealing with the MS world out there. OpenOffice didn't set out to become a revolutionary, innovative project. OpenOffice is an example of a program that tries to do a job that a $300+ program does, except offered for free.
I've been very pleased with the stability, performance and featureset of the open office 2 beta - we've been using it internally for a month or so and it is miles better than the current 1.x codebase.
you might look into trying it out - it might be a 'beta' but it's been very stable on our range of machines - we don't open any massive sized files like what you are looking for, and for that matter i haven't tried out the db side of the new release, but overall it's worth looking into if you are simply trying to open & examine large files.
oh, and i seem to recall that the max rows limit was increased in the 2.x oo spreadsheet app as well, but can't remember how much...
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