>It's bad almost by definition, at least in the free software world, to comment code in a non-English language.
I totally agree that it's much better if comments are in english.
But this is a historical grown source, the oldest parts of it are about 10 years old.
As soon as it could be forseen that development will continue in an international team of developers ( that is after being bought by Sun ) new comments have been done using english language, well at least we tried to;-)
Changing all the old comments takes a lot of time tho and is just not yet finished, like a lot of other stuff, that is one of the reason that it's an pre-alpha version.
Of course SUN could have delayed the opening of the source code for let's say 1 or 2 years till all old comments have been translated and till everything is perfectly working and stable.
But as far as I understand it that's not the OpenSource way of doing things. Famous quote from the Cathedral and the Bazaar: publish early publish often.
Folks it's Open Source now if it bothers you that there are some source code comments in german join the team and fix it. I do believe that there are a lot of skilled german open source programmers out there that can help with translating comments while changing the source:-)
>I would have thought that Sun changed more stuff, because it's been a while since they bought the german company star division, that originally wrote SO.
Well Sun buying Star Division did gladfully NOT mean that all the Star Division developers had been fired. Actually a lot of the former Star Division and new Sun StarOffice developers will continue to work on OpenOffice and will try to speed up new developers joining the openoffice.org community in being able to understand and change the source.
That's the reason for the Solver [output tree] files.
You don't need to compile everything to work on it. Just cvs checkout the projects you want to work on and compile those against the solver output tree which constains all the header files libraries and so on from all the other modules.
After your changes have been commited to the cvs repository they will automatically be available in their compiled form in the next solver version for other developers working on depenend modules.
There's already a naming discussion going on in the general openoffice discussion mailing list, feel free to join;-)
> there is still one binary
Well the 'Applications' still share a lot of things which is a good thing. If the same dialog for example can be used in the spreadsheet and in the presentation why not share it in a shared library.
And if application startup is basically bringing up the same internal application infrastructure plus loading necessary shared libs etc. why not share that in the same executable.
OpenOffice has a bunch of modules depending on each other. There are different kinds of application layers ( eg. the low level graphic layer and a high level spreadsheet application layer ).
Building the whole thing takes a lot of time and it would be insufficient if everyone would have to build the whole thing just to change a few lines of source code.
Instead the delevelopment process is organized as following:
After a module has been build it 'delivers' everything that is needed by other modules ( library files, header files,... ) to a common directory for the current build version to the SOLVER directory.
The solver files that can be downloaded at openoffice.org are just all those already compiled library files, headers, resources, IDL files,... for one platform.
When the build environment has been setup a developer just needs the solver files ( milestone tarball ) and the sources for the module he wants to work on ( cvs checkout of the relevant subprojects ).
Have a look at all the technical documentation on openoffice.org for details.
Slashdot Mirror
>It's bad almost by definition, at least in the free software world, to comment code in a non-English language.
I totally agree that it's much better if comments are in english.
But this is a historical grown source, the oldest parts of it are about 10 years old.
As soon as it could be forseen that development will continue in an international team of developers ( that is after being bought by Sun ) new comments have been done using english language, well at least we tried to ;-)
Changing all the old comments takes a lot of time tho and is just not yet finished, like a lot of other stuff, that is one of the reason that it's an pre-alpha version.
Of course SUN could have delayed the opening of the source code for let's say 1 or 2 years till all old comments have been translated and till everything is perfectly working and stable.
But as far as I understand it that's not the OpenSource way of doing things. Famous quote from the Cathedral and the Bazaar: publish early publish often.
Folks it's Open Source now if it bothers you that there are some source code comments in german join the team and fix it. I do believe that there are a lot of skilled german open source programmers out there that can help with translating comments while changing the source :-)
>I would have thought that Sun changed more stuff, because it's been a while since they bought the german company star division, that originally wrote SO.
Well Sun buying Star Division did gladfully NOT mean that all the Star Division developers had been fired. Actually a lot of the former Star Division and new Sun StarOffice developers will continue to work on OpenOffice and will try to speed up new developers joining the openoffice.org community in being able to understand and change the source.
---Bernd
That's the reason for the Solver [output tree] files.
You don't need to compile everything to work on it. Just cvs checkout the projects you want to work on and compile those against the solver output tree which constains all the header files libraries and so on from all the other modules.
After your changes have been commited to the cvs repository they will automatically be available in their compiled form in the next solver version for other developers working on depenend modules.
--
Bernd
>(funny, it is still called soffice ;)
There's already a naming discussion going on in the general openoffice discussion mailing list, feel free to join ;-)
> there is still one binary
Well the 'Applications' still share a lot of things which is a good thing. If the same dialog for example can be used in the spreadsheet and in the presentation why not share it in a shared library.
And if application startup is basically bringing up the same internal application infrastructure plus loading necessary shared libs etc. why not share that in the same executable.
-- BerndOpenOffice has a bunch of modules depending on each other. There are different kinds of application layers ( eg. the low level graphic layer and a high level spreadsheet application layer ).
Building the whole thing takes a lot of time and it would be insufficient if everyone would have to build the whole thing just to change a few lines of source code.
Instead the delevelopment process is organized as following:
After a module has been build it 'delivers' everything that is needed by other modules ( library files, header files, ... ) to a common directory for the current build version to the SOLVER directory.
The solver files that can be downloaded at openoffice.org are just all those already compiled library files, headers, resources, IDL files, ... for one platform.
When the build environment has been setup a developer just needs the solver files ( milestone tarball ) and the sources for the module he wants to work on ( cvs checkout of the relevant subprojects ).
Have a look at all the technical documentation on openoffice.org for details.
OpenOffice build process
Cordially,
Bernd Eilers