LibreOffice 4.1.0 is right around the corner and developers are busy as beavers getting it ready. One of the things featured this release might be hard for ordinary users to see, but is every bit as important. Continued code refinement and clean-up will make LibreOffice 4.1.0 more efficient, smaller, and easier to contribute to and compile.
Michael Meeks posted of all their efforts today “under-the-hood” that he said “may seem trivial in isolation but cumulatively add up to a code-base that is far easier to understand and to contribute to.” One of these is the build system that has now been fully converted to GNU make. Not only does this make it easier for users and distro developers to compile the code, but it also finishes much faster and leaves a smaller footprint. As Meeks put it, “No shell pollution, no ‘bootstrap’ script, no Perl build wrapper, no obsolete ‘dmake’ required, just plain GNU make files—and incredible build parallelism—after generating headers, we could utilize a thousand CPUs. This is a clean-cut task with a clear boundary; like the process of removing dead code in previous releases, it is now complete—freeing up developers for more interesting things.”
In other LibreOffice news, a LibreOffice Bug Confirmation (triage) Contest has begun.
