How to setup a libreoffice development system

Requirements

• You must have at least 26 GB of disk space for getting the git repo code and building it and a few more GBs for a debug build.
• Need a minimum of 4 GB RAM but more than 8 GB is ideal.

Reference system spec

• RAM - 16 GB
• Disk - 256 GB SDD
• CPU - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K CPU @ 3.50GHz

Build dependencies

On Fedora 15+ & derivatives upto 21

sudo yum-builddep libreoffice

On Fedora 22 upwards :

sudo dnf builddep libreoffice

Getting the LO source code

The following gets the LO source code from git repo. This will take some time depending on your bandwidth.

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core libreoffice

Build from source code

Go to the root of the downloaded git repository.

./autogen.sh --with-parallelism=5 --without-junit --enable-debug  --without-java  --without-doxygen --without-help --without-myspell-dicts
make

You can tweak the --with-parallelism param value to the number of cores you want to use for compilation. --enable-debug adds debugging symbols for debugging later.

On our reference machine, make takes 1.75 hrs to finish.

Running Libreoffice

To run the LibreOffice you have just built, do

$ instdir/program/soffice --calc

Advanced setup

Please refer https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/BuildingOnLinux

Debugging

The easiest way to start LO in gdb is to run : make debugrun

Refer https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/How_to_debug for a primer on using gdb

Setting yourself up for patch submission

Libreoffice developers use a code review tool called gerrit. Refer the LO wiki https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/gerrit for setting up your gerrit account and steps to patch submission. For further information on patch submission and modification during review refer https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/gerrit/SubmitPatch

Libreoffice Opengrok

Libreoffice Opengrok is a very useful tool to search in the libreoffice git repositories.