Thursday, February 1, 2007

OpenOffice.org git repository

You could have seen already two blog entries about a new SCM for OOo (Is Subversion OOo's next revision control system? (by Nils Fuhrmann) and OpenOffice.org SCM) (by Jens-Heiner Rechtien), who seem to prefer Subversion. But I would rather go the git way, because this could tighten the cooperation between ooo-build and up-stream; namely the features or fixes could be much more easily integrated from ooo-build back to up-stream.

From my point of view:

  • git should be used just for the source code, not for the project WWW pages. I don't care about the tool used for the WWW pages - I think that CVS is perfectly sufficient for them, I don't think it's really necessary to convert them to anything else (no extensive branching there, they change just occasionally, etc.)
  • The OOo code should be split to 2 parts - the source code itself, and the 3rd party code that is just a verbatim or a slightly patched version of free libraries (agg, beanshell, berkeleydb, bitstream_vera_fonts, boost, ..., zlib). The contemporary Linux distros are able to compile without them, using --with-system-libs configure option; on Win32 we could ship a pre-compiled pack - no need to recompile these again and again.

The OpenOffice.org git repository for testing purposes is now available at http://go-oo.org/git/ - feel free to try it. More about the topic is in the OOo Wiki.