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I’m going slightly mad
It finally happened!

– Queen, Innuendo, I’m going slightly mad

As question “why does my post not appear to be visible to the world on the blog hours after I posted” was replied with: “Yeah, that is just the caching. There is nothing we can do about it”. I finally decided to go somewhere else. Should have done that a lot earlier, I guess: The post is still not up almost six hours later.

Call for Testing: Ubuntu LibreOffice packages

Now these points of data make a beautiful line.
And we're out of Beta.
We're releasing on time.
Ellen McLain/Jonathan Coulton -- Portal, Still Alive

Yes, its true: We are out of Beta and we are releasing on time!
And if you are adventurous, you can test the current LibreOffice 3.6.0 release candidate 1 from the LibreOffice prereleases PPA:
Please especially test all the fancy new things in this release!
One late feature (came in with beta3) I would like to especially point out are the new masterpages in Impress by Alexander Wilms, Mateus Machado Luna, Stefan Knorr and all the other cool guys on the LibreOffice design team. And before anyone screams "pics or it didnt happen!" -- here is a screenshot of them running on Ubuntu Quantal:



In addition, for the more conservative folks LibreOffice 3.5.5 rc3 (which is the final 3.5.5 version) has been updated to the LibreOffice PPA.
LibreOffice

Garbage collecting the LibreOffice development wiki entry pages

"Oh, it's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it"
-- Faith No More, "We Care A Lot"


I just cleaned and sorted the LibreOffice development pages:
which still contained lots of old, obsolete and even misleading content in a huge unsorted page, which likely nobody bothered to clean up because it ... was a huge unsorted page. I hope the new pages with lots of obsolete stuff killed and lots of nonessential/reference stuff moved down to the end of the page, leaving the top of the page for the essentials will make life quite a bit easier for new contributors!
LibreOffice

Rotated LibreOffice EasyHacks!

I just rotated the featured items on the LibreOffice EasyHacks Page. If you are interested in contributing and wondered what you could do, here are a few selected suggestions:



You will find more info on the LibreOffice EasyHacks Page and an even wider range of things to do on the EasyHacks by required Skill Page.

Gerrit for LibreOffice

Sometimes I give myself the creeps
Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me
It all keeps adding up
I think I'm cracking up
Am I just paranoid?
-- Basket Case, Green Day

It seems like the gerrit for LibreOffice is ready for primetime now. I updated a sweet and short introduction on how to use it. If you want your first patch in LibreOffice, with gerrit you wont need a mailing list subscribe, a freedesktop account or any other administrative overhead. You just need this:
For core developers, who want to review uploaded patches, this is needed:

I hope, we can again lower the barrier to entry for new contributors and make the progress of LibreOffice more transparent with this. In addition, it will simplify the discussion of certain changes and give it some more structure. Finally, this enables us to significantly improve the use of our tinderboxes. I expect a lot of good things to happen there soon.

LibreOffice 3.6.0 beta 1 preview packaged in ppa

Since a few days the libreoffice-prereleases ppa has a version of LibreOffice 3.6.0 beta 1 packaged for Ubuntu precise (12.04 LTS) as a preview. It is not a release as it would end up in would end up in Ubuntu Quantal or one you would want to use on a productive system -- all the warnings for the 3.6.0 alpha 1 package still apply. So install this in a VM of your choice and go viciously testing on it! You are also invited to try out and explore all the new features of LibreOffice 3.6.x that Cor has so helpfully collected together in the linked blog posts!

Happy testing!
LibreOffice

gerrit master sync from freedesktop

The master and the 3.5.x and 3.6.x release branches (links require OpenID login) on gerrit.libreoffice.org are now synced every 15 minutes by the friendly LibreOffice gerrit bot from freedesktop. If you based your patch on these branches more than 15 minutes ago, you can be sure to be able to send it there for review without any hassle. Once we make the gerrit repository our reference, this syncing isnt needed anymore of course (we would only need to push those changes to freedesktop then -- the other way around). But for all practical proposes, everyone should be able to submit his patches to gerrit with this.

Ubuntu LibreOffice Development Kickstart Guide

This is a short note, that I wrote some short and concise wiki pages on LibreOffice development on Ubuntu. Please dont tell me that there is way more info on the TDF Wiki, thats true -- but also not the point: In fact, there is quite possibly too much information on the TDF wiki  ;). So this is the stripped down info on what you really need to know to start working on LibreOffice on Ubuntu:

Also note the older page by Christopher M. Penalver about Bug Filing against LibreOffice on Ubuntu:

completing the bunch.

Updated LibreOffice QA EasyHacks!

I recently updated the QA EasyHacks, here is a selection of Tasks related to QA that are easy for newcomers to get started with:

A full list of QA-related things to get started in the project can be found here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Easy_Hacks

Verify a Bugfix a day, it keeps the doctor away! ;)