Apache OpenOffice on FreeBSD-ppc (was Re: LibreOffice 4)

[Alexey Dokuchaev]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 09:45:29PM -0500, Pedro Giffuni wrote:
> Maho and I are committers in Apache OpenOffice and we would be absolutely
> delighted to bring more FreeBSD platform support.

Cool; glad to know that some our fellow committers are also involved with
project's upstream. ;-)

> We were considering dropping AOO3 from the tree as AOO4 should be better.

Probably; I was just judging from personal (very nice) experience with OO3,
and lack thereof with LO; OO4 is certainly on my list to try (and fix, if
needed).

> Apache OpenOffice 4.0.1 will be the last OpenOffice release to build with
> the old GNU toolchain in base. The Mac OSX port is forcing us to move
> aggressively towards C++11.

I don't quite understand: do you mean that new OO code with start to use
C++11 feature aggressively, or just won't be tested against old libraries?
Since C++11 implies compatibility with old code, with little luck we should
be able to keep building in on e.g. stable/8 as long as OO does not use any
of new C++11-only specific *language* features.

> My recommendation is to start from 4.0.1 and then upstream your changes (it
> should not be difficult). For PPC you can, of course, borrow heavily from
> linux-ppc. Here is an old guide that may help:
> 
> https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Lazy_Hackers_Guide_To_Porting

Thanks; I'll certainly take a look; right now I'm still fighting with X11
problems on PPC and Clang-builds on -CURRENT/i386.

> I will see if I can find some expert help for the endianness issue but don't
> be shy about asking questions upstream ;-).

There should not be any technical difficulties with handling endianness in
source code per se; only in case fixing it would require changing the build
framework files, some help might come handy.

./danfe