May | 2018 | Thorsten's Weblog

Let me join Mike, Miklos and Björn in the blog reporting on last month’s LibreOffice Hackfest in Hamburg (a good old tradition):

LibreOffice Python hacking

With a nice round number of 100000 (decimal 32) participants and surprisingly non-rainy and warm April weather in Hamburg, we met at very stylish freiheit.com offices that also generously provided us with food and beverages. Further shout-outs to TDF (and all its donors) for providing travel support for our volunteers and, equally importantly, sponsoring CIB’s very own Armin Le Grand fulltime mentoring on and off site.

You can find more details on contributions and work done on the event’s wiki page, and also for the simultaneous German community meetup (wiki, blog); just as much here: code-wise, we had 55 commits from hackfest participants over the weekend –

11  Zdeněk Crhonek
 9  Stephan Bergmann
 5  Christian Lohmaier
 5  Katarina Behrens
 5  Sophia Schröder
 4  Armin Le Grand
 3  Michael Meeks
 3  Tamas Bunth
 3  Heiko Tietze
 2  Markus Mohrhard
 2  Miklos Vajna
 1  Linus Behrens
 1  Nithin Kumar Padavu

and probably another 15 or so landing in the weeks after, but with substantial work carried out during the hackfest. I’m really quite happy with the outcome, as well as with the number of new and old names in the above list!

I’d like to highlight one particular area of work (as it’s not reflected yet in the list above i.e. no commits on master yet), namely Regina’s ongoing endeavour to improve LibreOffice ODF conformance (or alternatively the ODF specification, if instead she believes LibreOffice gets it right and the spec has it wrong). This is especially noteworthy as it’s purely volunteer work, including weekly attendance and contribution to ODF technical committee phone meetings. Regina spent the weekend poring over LibreOffice drawing subsystem minutiae with CIB’s Armin Le Grand, and in the end wrote up a plan on making the layer functionality in Draw/Impress more useful and compliant to how ODF specifies layers: Make drawing layers ODF conform .

For myself, I (almost) didn’t get any hacking done but instead spent time mentoring, getting face time with many people, providing hackers with (mostly double) espressos, and had a handful of quite excellent discussions that only tend to happen with enough of smart people in the same room:

discussed opportunities around GPG signing and encryption for the public sector with Lothar Becker
pondered the future of application development (electron vs. browser-only vs. native ports – and all kinds of in-betweens) with Tim, Michael, and Benjamin
got the latest news around autocrypt, memory hole and delta.chat from Björn Petersen
went through a number of sticky problems TDF is facing with regard to upcoming GDPR end of May, with K-J, Uwe, Florian and Eike.
- BTW for the record, I consider GDPR a broadly good thing & not an undue burden, and a useful motivation also for volunteer and charity organisations to live up to some data protection ideals.

And last but not least thanks to Armin, Bubli, Michael and Siegmund for being the local CIB posse on the ground for that hackfest; and of course thanks to CIB for letting us have such an outstanding LibreOffice team – and to all volunteers donating a full weekend to LibreOffice!