OOo-Dev3.0 Developer Snapshot (build DEV300_m7) which installs as OOo-Dev 3.0 has been uploaded to the mirror network.

The rename of the product name to OOo-Dev allows the installation of the OpenOffice.org snapshot parallel to an OpenOffice.org  'final' (released) version. For this version some language packs have been uploaded and they should install into the OOo-Dev installation.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link
http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html

If the Bouncer links that I've placed into the download page do not work for you then you might want to use the 'non JavaScript' page
http://download.openoffice.org/680/index-nojs.html

Or you may take one of the mirror servers listed at http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/
and take the files from the ../developer/DEV300_m7 directory.

MD5SUMS:
http://download.openoffice.org/680/md5sums.html

tags: openoffice.org qa release snapshot

tags: conference

i browsed lately over our extensions repository and noticed besides many other interesting extensions the OOoDesignedLabels extension. It provides a lot of new templates for labels from Worldlabel.com. The extension is freeware and works best and without any changes with labels that you can buy directly by Worldlabel. I think that is exactly the right way to use extensions with some commercial background. The templates are something special, useful for users who work a lot with this kind of labels, perfect for users who use labels from Worldlabel. And Worldlable use the repository to point users to their offering where they normally make money with. From my point of view that is a perfect combination and i would like to see many many more of these extensions because all of them are promotion for OpenOffice.org as well and show that OpenOffice.org is ready to get explored by commercial ISVs. All the nice and useful stuff available for another office suite can probably be provided for OpenOffice.org as well.

The OpenOffice.org project offers help for all ISVs, help to port or migrate their solutions to OpenOffice.org. Or even to implement new solutions for OpenOffice.org. It's quite easy to offer that because you can join and ask on our mailing lists for help, it's FREE. And most often you will get answers from the developers directly. Where get you direct developer support apart from open source projects? And of course if you need more help and if you are willing to invest some money there are a lot offerings from OpenOffice.org specialist available too including Sun Microsystems.

By the way i am happy with all extensions, the free and open and the commercial ones. Especially the ones that are coming from individual community members and i hope that they will and can do more and more in the project.

tags: extensions help support

It is rumored that adding new features to OpenOffice.org is very hard or close to impossible for volunteer developers if that feature is not already a part of ODF, the file format OpenOffice.org uses for its documents. I think this is unfounded rumor, but understanding that needs some explanations.

ODF is under control of the ODF Technical Committee(TC) at OASIS, an important non-profit consortium that drives the development of open standards in the industry. This implies that extensions of and changes to this standard must be done following the OASIS rules. This is especially important for intellectual property (IP) and licensing issues. Simply put (skipping the lengthy description of boring legal details) the IPR Policy of OASIS doesn't allow a TC member to post an enhancement proposal to the TC's mailing list if the proposal is not his own idea. Instead of that it requires that the author of the proposal submits it to the OASIS ODF TC himself. This is the reason why we (the Sun developers working on OpenOffice.org) don't propose ODF enhancements brought up by Non-Sun OpenOffice.org developers, but ask them to post the proposals to a particular mailing list that every OASIS TC has in place to get feedback and suggestions from non-TC members. [1]

Posting to this “comment list“ does not require an OASIS membership, only an IP statement regarding the posted topic is required. The TC then will pick the proposal up and discuss it, in the same way as a proposal of a member. And in the same way as we help developers to integrate their code if they send us a patch, all OpenOffice.org developers[2] in the TC will help them to contribute their ODF suggestions if they post them to the comment list. To show you that this is not pure speculation, here's a real life example for this.

One of our long-time contributors, Giuseppe Castagno, wanted to implement a feature for OpenOffice.org Writer: the Table Of Content should be able to add chapter numbers in front of page numbers so that a TOC like the following could be created:

 

Please refer to issue 53420 for further reference. We discussed the situation and Giuseppe agreed to post a suggestion to the comment list. After some discussion this was accepted as a proposal and three weeks later the proposal was accepted to become included into the next ODF version.

Admittedly it was a little bit more work to do than just hacking, it required some thinking and writing do describe the feature in a way that its file format specification lives up to the ODF standard. IMHO the result clearly justifies this additional effort: users and applications benefit from the standards work and the developer now not only has contributed some code to OpenOffice.org but also has its own share of the development of an industry standard!

Perhaps you are now curious about the feature that will be part of ODF 1.2. Well, after taking a break of a few months Giuseppe started to specify and implement the feature in close cooperation with Oliver Wittmann (Development), Frank Meies (Development), Frank Loehmann (UX), Michael Ruess (QA) and Uwe Fischer (Documentation) from Sun. The work was finished and integrated into the DEV300_m2 milestone and so will be available in the OOo 3.0 Beta. Giuseppe's work is great and I will take this opportunity to thank him in public for this work and all the other patches we got from him in the past.

Thanks, Giuseppe!

[1] Just to avoid misunderstandings: of course we still will support such proposals from others in the TC if we find them useful.

[2] Of course I can speak only for the Sun developers here but I assume that the same is true for other TC members working on OpenOffice.org (e.g. people from Novell or IBM)

tags:

After support of Windows Installer technology, Solaris packages and Linux RPMs, Linux Debian packages will be the fourth platform in which bundled extensions can be added to an OpenOffice.org installation set. Shell scripts are now available, that are part of Debian packages containing extensions (oxt files) and that take care of registering this extensions in OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta during installation process. This scripts are part of child workspace native145, that is planned to be integrated before OOo 3.0 Beta is released.

If you want to make use of this new feature, you can find an explanation of the process of creating OpenOffice.org installation sets containing extensions here:

 http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Extensions_Integration_into_Installation_Set

Important parts of the new Debian shell scripts in the cvs module "setup_native" were created by the OOo community. Special thanks goes to Kami, who requested this new feature because he needs it for his own installation sets.

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