If you noticed, I seems to disappear for 2 weeks because of freezing bug in OpenOffice.org. I spent 2 weeks for only one task; compiling OpenOffice.org on Ubuntu Gutsy. I'm not familiar with development environment used at Sun and in OpenOffice project. There are so many technical terms to learn. By the way, I finally add a patch from #81519 to OpenOffice.org 1ubuntu5 which my request #140878 is not responded yet. So it's time to share what I have done in this 2 weeks.

My first step was to obtain the latest source of openoffice.org.

apt-get source openoffice.org
apt-get build-dep openoffice.org

Wait for a while and I got openoffice.org-2.3.0 ready to build. I tried to rebuild immediately to make sure it work as expect by this source.

cd openoffice.org-2.3.0
debuild -uc -us

I waited for 13 hours to let it complete the process. Long waiting... Eventually, it worked as expect. Then I tried to see what I can do to this source and found that actually it contained build wrapper called ooo-build using based source called OOG680 at milestone m5. During that time, the latest version is SRC680 at m231. I tried to manually change based source to the latest one but unfortunately, lot of patches could not be applied successfully. Then I realized that ooo-build is a kind of patch system for OpenOffice. There are so many patches, 765 patches.

I tried to disable inapplicable patched one by one. This process took me a week without success. There are lots of patches to go. So I decided to try another approach. I tried to extract the patch for this issue to put it in ooo-build instead. But question is how? I searched in Google on how to work with OpenOffice.org. It took me a few days.

mkdir cvs
cd cvs
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.services.openoffice.org:/cvs
cvs co OpenOffice

Warning: CVS size is about 2.3 GB. I was ready to run cvs diff but I need to know 2 tags. After looking around in Google again. I found that these 2 tags are in below format.

CWS_{uppercase MWS}_{uppercase CWS}_ANCHOR
CWS_{lowercase MWS}_{lowercase CWS}

For the fix of this issue, MWS is src680 and CWS is i18n38. So I have 2 tags like below.

CWS_SRC680_I18N38_ANCHOR
cws_src680_i18n38

Next thing I have to know is affected module. The correct way is to use cwsquery command but unfortunately, I don't have enough permission to run that command. By the way, ooo-build also provides tag list so I found below line.

i18n38 : SRC680_m228 : cws_src680_i18n38 : i18npool icu

Now I know 2 modules i18npool and icu so making patch should be as simple as below.

cvs -z3 diff -u -rCWS_SRC680_I18N38_ANCHOR -rcws_src680_i18n38 i18npool > i18n38-i18npool.diff
cvs -z3 diff -u -rCWS_SRC680_I18N38_ANCHOR -rcws_src680_i18n38 icu > i18n38-icu.diff

Then I had to edit the diff files to remove all changes regarding the change of file revision numbers and copy them to ooo-build/patches/src680. and add below lines to ooo-build/patches/src680/apply in section [ TemporaryHacks ].

# icu regression test
i18n38-i18npool.diff, i#81519, sugree
i18n38-icu.diff, i#81519, sugree

Next step is to build it again.

debuild -uc -us

Beware! You must have at least 9.5 GB to build. Below are products of my 2 weeks.

deb http://download.thaigrid.or.th/pub/ubuntu/contrib gutsy openoffice.org
deb-src http://download.thaigrid.or.th/pub/ubuntu/contrib gutsy openoffice.org

Simply sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade to try. Note that if you want to see what I did last 2 weeks in details, read my tweets.

Tags: openoffice.org, ooo-build, ubuntu, gutsy