With a new major release of OpenOffice.org we finally get the opportunity to update some of our build tools. Especially compilers could use some refreshing, the default ones used by Sun OOo release engineering date from 2003/2004. A pretty complete list of the compilers used for production builds of OOo for the major platforms and distributions can be found here.

The planned changes in detail:

• Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86: We (Sun OOo release engineering) plan to switch to SunStudio 12 (09/07). This release has better support for boost, which is becoming more prominent in our code base. More important, SunStudio 12 is freely available (registration required) and thus is already the compiler of choice for most Solaris developers. It looks like we can safely drop support for older SunStudio compilers after the switch, please notify me if this is not the case.
• Linux: Most likely the current gcc-4.2.2 will be the future default Linux compiler for Sun OOo developers. We will still support older compilers, way back to gcc-3.3.x, they are needed for MacOSX 10.3 and OS/2. As soon as these two platforms have upgraded to gcc-4.x we will be able to drop support for gcc-3.x completely as everyone else seems to use gcc-4.x.
• Windows: Most probably we will switch to .Net 2008 once it is released, for now we'll use .Net 2005. We will still support .Net 2003 for a while to protect the investment some OOo developers have made into this compiler, but this can't last forever.
  

tags: build compiler openoffice.org

With milestone SRC680 m218 SunStudio 12 enters the list of supported compilers for building OOo. Actually the only change needed was to add a SunStudio 12 test to configure. This is amazing, considering the amount of new features and changes which went into the latest SunStudio version on one hand and the diversity of the OOo code base on the other hand.

Currently supported compilers:

• Solaris (sparc, x86)
  
• SunStudio: all versions from SunStudio 8 up to SunStudio 12
• Linux (x86, sparc, ppc)
  
• gcc: all versions from gcc-3.3.x up to gcc-4.2.0
• Linux (x86_64)
• gcc: gcc-4.0.1 up to gcc-4.2.0
  
• Windows
• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and 2005
• Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2005
• mingw-gcc: gcc-3.4.4
• MacOSX (ppc)
  
• gcc-3.3
• MacOSX (intel)
  
• gcc-4.0.1
  
• FreeBSD
  
• gcc: all versions from gcc-3.3.x up to gcc-4.2.0
• OS/2
• gcc-3.3.5

Not all platform/compiler combinations are tested on a regular basis so some build breakage might still occur. If this happens, release engineering will gladly accept reasonable patches to get things going again.

Two platforms - MacOSX ppc and OS/2 - depend on gcc-3.3.x support, otherwise we would drop gcc-3.3.x from the list. This version exhibits a long standing bug in the old gcc parser which is triggered very frequently in the OOo code base. The new parser which was introduced with gcc-3.4 does not exhibit this bug. For new ports, gcc-3.3.x should be avoided.

tags: build compiler openoffice.org tools