HOME	BUILD INSTRUCTIONS	TESTING STATUS	ISSUES
				GENERAL
				OpenOffice.org 1.0.1
				OpenOffice.org 1.0.3

General Issues

This section will be used to list all past and current issues that impose problems in building or running openoffice.org.

Here will be listed all issues that are generic across all openoffice.org builds, and every other section will entail issues related to only that build.

Porting Bridges

Bridges is the module within OpenOffice.org that allows bindings between languages and object models. This is achieved by creating a proxy object in one environment (a specific language and hardware platform) so that the actual object represented by the proxy is available in a second environment.

The way in which OpenOffice.org achieves this is by creating bridges to the binary UNO specification (which is very low level to reduce performance penalties), this way there is a reduced number of bridges between environments. The bridges required for OpenOffice.org to run are:

C++ -> UNO	&	UNO -> C++
C -> UNO	&	UNO -> C
Java -> UNO	&	UNO -> Java

The C and Java bridges are compiler, and platform independent, however the C++ bridge is not. Ralph Thomas has finished the gcc2 bridge for Irix, and it is clearly working very well! Later on down the track though, we will need that bridge re-written for gcc3, and for the MIPSpro compilers.

Ralph is currently working on (among other things) a MipsPro bridge, as the port to MipsPro 7.4 and SGI's STL has started.

Build Parallelisation

OpenOffice.org Builds can take up to 24 hours at times, but the potential to dramatically reduce this number is available. OpenOffice.org uses dmake to build as it's make system (dmake = distributed make) which can spawn processes over a number of processors and even machines. We are currently using an 8 CPU O3K to build OpenOffice.org and would like to utilise this functionality. The issue here is that the dependencies in the makefiles are not exactly correct. They work fine for a sequential build that uses no parallelisation, but can cause troubles during a parallel build. Almost all of these issues were fixed in 2002, but since then, there have been changes to the make system that have introduced more problems. Although these issues are not of the highest priority, they will eventually be dealt with to allow a faster, seamless build of OpenOffice.org.