ccache for MSVC

For those building OpenOffice.org on Win32, it might be interesting that I've extended ccache to deal with MSVC. I've done it during our Novell HackWeek; I hope you'll enjoy the result as much as I enjoyed the hacking ;-)

It is easy to use, instead of guw.exe /path/to/cl.exe, you'll use guw.exe ccache.exe /path/to/cl.exe in your CXX environment variable after having sourced the environment. To see the ccache statistic, use ccache -s. You can override the directory where is the cache stored by exporting CCACHE_DIR="c:\where\you\want". Should you find any bugs, please send me patches :-)

I've not measured the speedup too much yet, but it was >20% in vcl compared to non-ccache run, the penalty of the initial fill of the cache was like 17% [compared to non-ccache]. Would be great if someone did a measurement of the entire build.

The patch and the binary are here, some more info there.

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.

PF 2007

OOo 2.1 source archives

OpenOffice.org 2.1 source archives are now split the same way you used to see in ooo-build - to the core part (the only one really needed by the developers), system (libraries that could be already present in the system), binfilter (filters to load/save the old StarOffice formats), l10n (translations to other than English and German), and sdk (Software Development Kit). Additionally the archives are compressed with bzip2 instead of gzip for additional savings.

Big thanks to Joost who made it possible from the up-stream side. ooo-build will start using these archives. We all hope that for the beginning OOo developers the archives are less scary now - 117MB to download instead of the former 300MB...

A a = A( b ) in C++

If you ever get involved in an argument whether A a = A( b ); is or is not equivalent to A a( b ); in C++ (like me yesterday ;-) ), the answer is "it depends". Eg. g++ has a switch for that, see the man page: -fno-elide-constructors: The C++ standard allows an implementation to omit creating a temporary which is only used to initialize another object of the same type. Specifying this option disables that optimization, and forces G++ to call the copy constructor in all cases.

So - in g++ by default it really means A a( b );, but it could also mean a copy construction from temporary [something like A a( A( b ) ); which you cannot really use unless b is a constant, eg. 3, or "blah" - would mean a declaration of a function named a otherwise] with -fno-elide-constructors. Try it yourself...

OpenOffice.org and SVG import

You know what is SVG, don't you? ;-) If not - it means Scalable Vector Graphics, and it is a vector graphics format that describes 2D graphics in XML.

So far, there's no native SVG import filter for OOo. There exists an external one, but unfortunately it has very strong dependencies - Java 5.0, and Batik.

I am currently working on another implementation. It is in C++, using the UNO Draw API, and a lighweight libsvg library. libsvg is just a parser - which is exactly what I need; unfortunately it does not seem to be too actively maintained :-( If you know about a better choice - just drop me a mail to kendy at openoffice.org. Thanks!

If you are interested in the current progress: I can import rectangles and circles, extension to other shapes is easy. I have problems with transformations - some of them work, some do not; to be improved. If you are interested in pictures, try this snowman, and have a look how it should look like, and how it currently looks in draw. If you are interested in source code, a snapshot is here.

Dina Holesovska

My daughter, Dina Holesovska, was born the last week, on 2006-09-05 at 20:08 CEST. You can see some photos of Dina with her happy mother and father here :-)