If you ever tried to use graphical bullets in Writer (Format → Bullets and Numbering → Graphics), you may have noticed that only the ODF filter can load and save such a numbering. This is now improved a lot. Motivated by seeing this is now handled in the binary DOC filter, I now added support for this also to the DOCX and RTF import and export filters. If you want to play with this feature, core.git also contains a DOCX and an RTF sample as well.

LibreOffice started to use Gerrit for code review, and while occasional contributors can submit patches manually, in case one does many reviews, it’s handy to use a dedicated tool. In core.git, we have logerrit, but that’s not advised for regular reviewers, either, git-review is recommended instead.

So I looked into git-review. The good news is that it’s packaged already for most distributions, e.g. a simple

on openSUSE installs it.

I wanted to use this tool for two tasks:

Probably the browser interface is still the best to comment (especially inline comment) and approve changes, though David even submitted a proof of concept patch for that as well.

Finally, let me just clear two myths:

When you create a rectangle or text frame in Writer, you have two choices. You can use the draw toolbar to create a drawinglayer rectangle, and you can also insert a text frame. The drawinglayer shapes are shared between the LibreOffice applications, and already supported having not only a bitmap or a color but a gradient or a hatch as a background. The benefit of Writer text frames is that they can contain anything a normal Writer document can — think of columns, tables, etc. These features are not supported by drawinglayer rectangles.

So till now you had to decide what to pick, but it wasn’t possible to have both. LibreOffice 4.1 makes this situation better. Now it’s possible to have gradient backgrounds in Writer text frames as well:

The nice thing is that this feature was already supported by ODF, just not by Writer, so no such paperwork was needed this time. Also the OOXML filters are updated. As I already stated in this comment, the binary DOC and RTF filters are not yet touched regarding this feature — though I already looked into the RTF one, and have some idea what rework is needed there first.

We spent the last weekend in Brussels, at FOSDEM 2013. Outside attending great talks, I most enjoyed meeting people I haven’t met in person before, in no particual order:

Also fixed fdo#48440, fdo#58646 and fdo#59419 during less-interesting talks. ;-)

Additionally, during the last day we had time for some site-seeing, some pictures are here. Slides of other LibreOffice talks are also available.

There are multiple strategies how to add testcases for code that sort of works, but has no or too few tests. One approach (that works quite well in LibreOffice, for example) is to just add tests for new code, and there the test is "good", if it passes, but it fails if you revert the corresponding real change.

An other approach to avoid duplicated tests is to use a tool like lcov, that can perform line or function coverage analysis for you, so a test is "good" if it increases the coverage. I wanted to look into this later approach for LibreOffice, but I decided it’s more fun to try this out for a smaller project first. That’s when adding testcases for BitlBee’s Skype plugin came into my mind.

The problem there is that manual testing typically includes multiple online Skype clients and an IRC client as well, and such tests are extremely unreliable. So I thought: if I’m able to mock both the interactive IRC and Skype clients, then it’ll be easy to test the C Skype plugin itself, even for very special scenarios (like changing a groupchat topic in the middle of inviting somebody to a groupchat or similar).

So here is the result looks like:

For skyped, the exact traffic is recorded and played back later; for BitlBee, only the outgoing traffic is exact, for the incoming traffic pyexpect allows just patterns (to allow tolerance for not interesting changes). Once the framework was available, it was quite easy to add testcases: I already have 70%+ coverage, and I think approaching the 100% function coverage is realistic. :-)

What was also interesting is that it turned out the latest upstream lcov release is not compatible with gcc-4.7, but the necessary patches are now integrated, and the next upstream release will work out of the box.

The BitlBee mock files can be found here. Given that there are now instructions to do similar analysis for LibreOffice as well, I hope to look into increasing test coverage for the classes I maintain as well.

Sounds like an easy question, but I learned over the past few years that for software projects, the answer is typically not a yes or no question.

Technically — for example — Virtualbox OSE is considered opensource, even the OSE abbreviation suggests that it’s a stripped down version of the real codebase, that is kept as a secret. At first thought I wouldn’t even imagine it’s possible to contribute back a patch from someone not working on the original — closed — codebase, but of course I may be wrong in case of Virtualbox.

There is also the question of what is open. Only tarballs of releases, or also the SCM repo used for development? Think of Amazon’s custom kernels where the code is open, but it’s obviously only a code dump, one is not supposed to contribute to it, and the individual changesets are not public.

Finally, even if the software itself is developed in a truly free manner, some enterprise version (which is based on the free version) may not be publicly developed, e.g. only the resulting tarball is public. I’m happy to see that at $dayjob even this last detail is quite public, think of LibreOffice or the Linux kernel.

Even though I spend little of my free time with sysadmin stuff these days, this came up recently. A few years ago I hit an issue about mdadm creating too new metadata that wasn’t handled by the installed kernel, so I remembered to use --metadata 0.90 when creating a new array. Additionally, I preferred using cfdisk for partitioning.

It turns out this caused quite some grief when it came to grub2, I wrote about this earlier — that was about the theory, in a VM. This is about the practice. In practice, gparted turned out to be too risky, and I choose the following approach to repartition the hard drives (so there is enough space for grub2) and upgrade the mdadm metadata.

First, I broke the mirror by removing one leg of the RAID1 array:

Then I created a new array (with a single leg) with the new metadata and formatted it:

Finally I copied over the live system:

The rest was easy: I booted a livecd to do the rsync once again (taking a few minutes only), and once the system was running from the new array, added the leg of the old array to the new one as well — and that’s it.

Here are a few contributions I made recently:

I think the first attempt to track LibreOffice RTF Writer regressions (bugs not presenting in some earlier versions) was in this mail. That started with 14 bugs, and of course while I fixed a few, new ones were added as well. I guess this is mostly due to testing work, since new fixes are usually covered by unit tests, so re-introducing the same problems nowadays is a bit more work.

I remember I was down to one regression a few months ago, but we still had performance problems, which got solved a few weeks ago, so I had the idea that I want to go down to zero during the holidays. It seems today I finally managed to do so — bugs tagged as rtf_filter and regression are gone, thanks everyone who helped! :-)

For the reference here are the queries: RTF regressions, fixed RTF regressions, Writer regressions.

Now that the list is empty, feel free to tag more bugs as rtf_filter from the long Writer list when needed.

Update: the list is now empty again, as of 2014-11-24, for the 4.4 release. ;-)

The Free Software Conference 2012 — orginized by FSF.hu — was held today @ Budapest. I gave a talk about hacking on new Writer features (slides).

We (with Andras) also ran the LibreOffice booth, and in idle cycles I also had time to kill this annoying bug. This year speakers got a t-shirt and a fine lunch, thanks for the organizers! :)