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Building OpenOffice.org on Windows

This document tries to fill a gap. The existing documentation about building OOo on Windows mainly reads like “Building OOo on Windows explained for Linux developers”. I will collect and summarize this existing documentation, fix some of its errors and try to add some comments that address people that are already developing on Windows and now want to get to know about building OOo. So this document is also for those who are not used to unix like command line interfaces, tar balls etc. Of course you must be familiar with a command line, but you don't need to be a shell wizard. But on the other hand it wouldn't hurt if you are. :-)

I collected information from several places, e.g.:

http://tools.openoffice.org/dev_docs/build_windows_tcsh.html#BuildRequirements

Building on Windows

Perl modules installation with CPAN

http://website.openoffice.org/support/en/howtos/1.html#1

The first problem with them is that there are many of them (there are even more than the mentioned four!). So you have to collect things by yourself and have to sort out non-Windows parts. Additionally some of the places contain outdated, incomplete or even wrong information. So I hope that my commented summary might come in handy for starters.

If this documentation is not enough for you or if you have a problem that is not addressed you can send a mail to the mailing list dev@openoffice.org (subscription is recommended) or you can meet OOo developers on IRC in the channel #dev.openoffice.org at freenode.de. If you just want to give some feedback about the documentation please also use the mailing list.

You might want to know how many time and disk space installing the build environment will cost you. For a rough estimation I give some download, install and build times. They have been measured on an Athlon 64 X2 3800 (2GHz) dual core machine with 1GByte RAM and a 300 GB SATA disk. My internet connection is a 8MBit DSL broadband connection.

I created this document for building OOo 2.x and using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express, the “free” (as in beer) offering from Microsoft. It also works with Microsoft Visual Studio 2003, the small differences are mentioned in the text. Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (without the “Express”) should work also but until now I have only one known case as a proof for this. But meanwhile things have become even more complicated because on the way to OpenOffice.org 3.0 the compiler was changed again and now the recommended compiler is Visual Studio 2008 (Express). Please see [[1]] for more details.

Building works fine on Windows XP. It should work also on Windows 2000. I have no information about it but I assume that using Windows 98/ME is not a good idea (Visual Studio Express 2005 cannot be installed on Windows 98, so you'd probably need the full version of Visual Studio 2003 - but Windows 98 is unsupported for OpenOffice.org 3.0 anyway Cloph). I have no personal experience with building on Vista, but I got reports that it works in the same way.

The first thing you need is the build environment. We are using Cygwin, a Windows program that emulates a complete Unix command line environment.

Download and install Cygwin

Go to http://www.cygwin.com und download the current version. If you already have Cygwin installed: you will need at least version 1.5.10. If you are using version 1.5.18 you must download a special version of the cygwin1.dll as described here. But in general I would recommend to use a recent version.

Cygwin has a web based installation process that is described here. I used the “Install from Internet” method and it worked like a charm. Make sure that you tell the setup to use the “Unix/binary” file type. Cygwin consists of some basic and a lot of optional packages. As building OOo needs some of these optional packages you have to select them in the installer. Unfortunately the list of packages mentioned at the place describing the installation process is incomplete, some more are listed here. Here's a complete list of the needed packages:

  • Category Archive: unzip, zip
  • Category Devel : autoconf, bison, cvs (for 2.x code line and 3.0 code line), flex, gcc-g++, gperf, make, openssl-devel (only needed for perl modules for CWS tooling, see below), subversion (for 3.x code line, minimum version 1.5.5)
  • Category Libs: openssl
  • Category Net: openssh, ncftp
  • Category Perl: perl (Perl)
  • Category Shells: rxvt, tcsh
  • Category Utils: patch, gnupg
  • Category Web: lynx, wget

The installer will automatically check and download some more packages needed by thosed listed here. The total amount of disk space is 46 MB for the download and 174 MB for the Cygwin installation, including all the additional Perl modules shown below. The whole process took roughly 20 minutes. Remark: this was without subversion, I will provide new data later.

Within the Cygwin Toolkit, some executables might be symlinks, in the version I have downloaded (1.5.24-2) it was awk.exe and gunzip.exe, older documentation also mentioned tar.exe. This can lead to a break of the build later, and the symlinks should be replaced by copies of the command they link to.

You can check this in the cygwin shell by calling e.g.

ls -l /bin/awk.exe

whether e.g. awk.exe is a symlink. In version 1.5.24-2 awk.exe is a link to gawk.exe. The shell will show this by putting out “awk.exe -> gawk.exe”. In this case gawk.exe must be copied to awk.exe by executing:

cd /bin
rm awk.exe
cp gawk.exe awk.exe

Take similar action for gunzip.exe that I found to be a link to unzip.exe.

In case you overlook something here or you have a newer Cygwin version with additional symlinks not mentioned here it's not a problem. You will get a helpful error message about an existing link in the configuration step (configure) later. The message will tell you which link you have to remove and you can do it following the advice given above for the awk.exe/gawk.exe pair.

Cygwin uses the command line shell “bash” by default and I always use this shell for everything I do with Cygwin. Building OOo is also possible using the shell “tcsh”, though some problems have been reported (see below). My recommendation is to use bash.

Though bash is the recommended shell you shouldn't try to deinstall tcsh. Cygwin doesn't have a simple mechanism to deinstall something automatically and it's still possible that one of the tools used for the build is using the tcsh internally because the script calling it doesn't evaluate the environment variable pointing to the shell to use. So it's safer to keep tcsh installed even if you use bash.

All commands written in this document are meant to be used in a bash (except explicitly told differently). In case you are not used to Unix command line shells you will need to familiarize yourself with some basic commands, but explaining that in closer detail is beyound the scope of this documentation. If you use the shell only for building the source all shell commands you will need are “cd” for the navigation between directories and “rm” in case you want to remove something. Use the “man” command to get more information (e.g. by calling “man cd”) or the “--help” option of the commands to get a short information about the basic options.

Download and install MS compiler and tools

Currently building on Windows needs a Microsoft Visual Studio C++ compiler. The “regular” builds for OpenOffice 2.x are done with Visual Studio 2003 that is available from Microsoft at a price. Building using the free (as in “free beer”) compiler Visual Studio 2005 Express works fine and is explained here. For OpenOffice 3.x the recommended as well as the "official" compiler is Visual Studio 2008 or 2008 Express.

Visual Studio 2005 Express (for OOo 2.x)

In case you still can find a copy of the 2005 Express compiler setup and it still works it downloads additional content from the Web. You only need to select the Graphical IDE. More can be downloaded later if you want, but for building and debugging OOo you will not need more than the basic package. The download and installation took me roughly 10 minutes and 220 MB on my hard disk. The complete (not Web based) compiler installation set still can be downloaded as an ISO-image (~450 MB) from the Manual Installation site.

Next step when you plan to use the “Express” version is installing the Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM). MASM is part of the paid version of Visual Studio (so you can skip that part if you are using it) but for the “Express” version you have to download it separately. It's only a very small download. I had a problem with the MASM installer on all machines where I used it: the setup started but then suddenly disappeared from the screen. I found a hanging msiexec.exe in the task manager and had to kill it manually. Fortunately the MASM was obviously installed correctly. It appeared in the “Add and remove software” dialog and the “ml.exe” was installed to “Vc/Bin” folder of VC8.

You also must download and install the Microsoft Windows Platform SDK. The usual instructions recommend to download it from here but I followed the recommendations from the Visual C++ site. There you can find a link (download requires Genuine Windows Validation). WARNING: don't install the new Vista platform SDK that is needed for the 2008 Express compiler (see below), the 2005 Express Compiler does not work with it.

The setup is again web based. You can either user the “Typical” installation or select “Custom” setup and deselect the packages you don't need. You need at least the following packages:

  • Microsoft Windows Core SDK
  • Microsoft Web Workshop (IE) SDK
  • Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) SDK
  • Microsoft Data Access Services (MDAC) SDK
  • Microsoft DirectShow SDK
  • Microsoft Windows Installer SDK

You can deselect all 64Bit parts of these packages, all samples, all source code modules and (if you want) every documentation. In total the installation filled 438 MB of my harddisk space (including the documentation, but without all other optional parts).

Warning: the first installation option is called “Register Environment Variables” and it is deselected by default. You shouldn't change this as selecting it will add directories with blanks to your PATH variable. This (or more precisely the quotes surrounding them) will cause troubles in Cygwin (see below). It is also possible that other installed Windows programs (not only Cygwin) can't cope with the changed PATH variable as the installer of the Platform SDK explicitly warns.

The only drawback of not selecting this option is that if you wanted to use the platform SDK for other projects except OOo you would have to take care for the correct environment yourself. The platform SDK creates some start menu entries for shells with a suitable configured environment so that shouldn't be a problem.

There is a library called “libcp.lib” in the “Lib” directory of the SDK; it must be either moved away or renamed. You can read more about this here.

There is another thing you have to change in the Platform SDK: you have to apply a small patch to one of the Platform SDK header files as described here.

Visual Studio 2008 Express (OOo 3.x development)

You can download the 2008 Express compiler Web based setup or a DVD ISO from Microsoft. You don't need to install any optional parts.

You also must download and install the Microsoft Windows Platform SDK, but now in the newer version 6.0.6001.18000.367-KRMSDK_EN that also supports Vista. This is either a DVD image or a net installer. You can either mount the DVD with a suitable tool, burn it do a DVD or use tools like winrar that can extract files from ISO files directly. You don't need to install any samples or documentation (especially not installing the latter saves a lot of disk space - 193 MB instead of nearly 1GB).

The Platform SDK setup will also install the .NET Framework 3.5 SDK.

It might be best to install the Windows SDK into the default directory, and if not that into one without capital letters in the path. I used D:\Dev\Win_SDK\ and received some linking errors in the Python module (see Issue 88568).

DirectX SDK

Another SDK that could be downloaded and installed is the Direct X9 SDK. If you don't want to download it you can disable DirectX support in the configuration step (“--disable-directx”). The current regular builds of OOo are done with a version of the DirectX SDK that is no longer available for download so it's necessary to search for a download link in the Web. The OOo pages mention several links, outdated as well as working links. I took the one from here (Genuine Windows Validation required). This is a 509 MB download as the setup is not Web based. Downloading, unpacking and installing took 30 minutes. As I deselected the sources and sample the resulting installation only was 189 MB.

Current (as of 2008/01) versions of the DirectX9 SDK and Windows Platform SDK do not fit to each other. To be able to build with DirextX enabled, you need to patch one file in the Platform SDK. See MSDN forum for details]. WARNING: do not use a DirectX10 SDK.

Download of additional files

You have to download some more files that you have to put into some prepared locations of the OOo source tree later. I mention it here because most of them are related to the MS compiler but perhaps it makes more sense first to download the source so that you can immediately copy the addtitional files to the proper location. Here's the list of files to download (with links) and the locations in the source tree where you must put them:

GDI+ Redistributable (Genuine Windows Validation required) external/gdiplus
Only for OOo2.x but due to a bug in configure still needed for 3.x: unicows.dll external/unicows
dbghelp.dll external/dbghelp
instmsiw.exe and instmsia.exe external/msi
for 2005 compiler: msvcp80.dll and msvcr80.dll (found in c:\WINDOWS/WinSxS/x86_Microsoft.VC80.CRT_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.42_x-ww_0de06acd/msvc external/msvcp80
for 2008 compiler (until DEV300 m22): msvcp90.dll and msvcr90.dll (found in $(msvcdir)\Vc\redist\x86\Microsoft.VC90.CRT) external/msvcp90
for 2008 compiler starting with DEV300m23: Microsoft_VC90_CRT_x86.msm and policy_9_0_Microsoft_VC90_CRT_x86.msm for non debug builds and Microsoft_VC90_DebugCRT_x86.msm and policy_9_0_Microsoft_VC90_DebugCRT_x86.msm for debug builds. These merge modules are available in VS08 Express Edition and VS08 Professional Edtion. All *.msm files are located at c:\Program Files\Common Files\Merge Module. external/msm90
GPC Unpack to external/gpc
Mozilla binary distribution

(WNTMSCIruntime.zip,WNTMSCIlib.zip,WNTMSCIinc.zip)

moz/zipped



msvcr71.dll and msvcp71.dll for Mozilla libraries (Search for them in the Web or on your PC. These files should be named as all lower case. Sometimes when downloaded they are upper case and this will cause 'file not found' errors towards the end of the build)) external/msvcp71

Some of the files can be found in a suitable OOo installation set also, so you can save the download by “stealing” it from your OOo installation.

OOo uses some Mozilla libraries. Building the corresponding sources is only possible with the VC2003 compiler so you have to use precompiled libraries that require the msvx71 libraries mentioned above. On Windows the Mozilla libraries are needed only for Mozilla address book support. Unfortunaly a bug in the module dependencies makes it necessary that the mozilla libaries are used anyway as otherwise building the module xmlsecurity fails (see below).

Downloading and installing additional Perl modules

As explained elsewhere in the wiki some perl modules must be installed with CPAN. The necessary command in the cygwin shell is

perl -MCPAN -e shell

If this command is executed the first time CPAN will ask for configuration. The autoconfiguration worked fine for me. I used the prompted installation just to see what is asked but always pressed “Enter” in each step, even in case I got an error message that asked me for confirmation. You can do the same and just ignore any error messages you might see (the same is true for all queries while you are executing the “install” command mentioned below).

Please note that CPAN is not able to deal with usernames containing spaces. To work around this fact, when CPAN asks you to specify the CPAN build and cache directory, change the default suggestion to /cpan.

At the end the CPAN shell appeared and is ready to accept commands for installations. Each module is installed by typing “install $MODULENAME”. The modules that must be installed are:

  • Archive::Zip
  • XML::Parser (though it seems that this is already installed; doesn't hurt to do it)
  • URI
  • LWP::UserAgent
  • SOAP::Lite
  • Crypt::SSLeay

The last three modules are only needed if you want to use the CWS tooling. These tools are necessary if you want to create and maintain your own Child Workspaces or if you want to build one of them. I recommend to install them anyway as sooner or later you want to work on a child workspace.

CPAN will detect if a selected module depends on other modules and it will offer to download them also. As explained please just confirm this.

Cygwin errors exhibited when using CPAN

  • I got an error message from CPAN somewhat like the following:
C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe: *** unable to remap C:\cygwin\bin\cygiconv-2.dll to same
address as parent(0x7C0000) != 0x7D0000

To fix this, I had to exit the Cygwin shell, run cmd.exe, then type "c:\cygwin\bin\ash.exe" to start the minimal shell, then type "/bin/rebaseall". Then CPAN worked when I ran it again.

  • I got another error when cygwin was performing "make install":
ERROR: Can't create '/usr/bin'; Do not have write permissions on '/usr/bin'

I can actually write to /usr/bin; however when I do "ls -ld /usr/bin", cygwin reports no write permission; and "chmod u+w /usr/bin" gives "Permission denied". This causes the install process to fail when it checks permissions. As a kludge, I installed vim, and edited line 368 of /usr/lib/perl5/5.10/ExtUtils/Install.pm, replacing this:

return -w $dir;

with this:

return 1;

which allowed installation to proceed.

Downloading and installing Java and other tools

Some OOo components as well as some build tools of OOo require Java. So you must download a JDK and the Java make utility Ant. It's not necessary to read the whole installation instructions from Ant. After downloading the zip package just unpack the bin and lib folders from it into a directory that you specfiy as ant-home in the configure step later. The path to this directory must not contain blank characters!

All OOo 2.x builds can be done with JDK 1.4.2. OpenOffice 3.x builds require JDK 1.5. "DEV300" milestones >= m37 and all OOo310 versions can also be built with JDK 1.6. OOo300 builds or older DEV300 milestone builds (<m37) with JDK 1.6 fail in the hsqldb module.

If a self contained Windows installer is desired in addition to the MSI installer files NSIS 2.0.4 is needed, but it is optional. If NSIS is not present the build will ignore this step. Used to be that newer version of NSIS used to break the build (#85657), but it seems that in now works for up to 2.3.7.

Getting the source code

You will place your code somewhere in your file system. In the following text this root directory will be called SRC_ROOT. Source code is available from the SCM (source code management system) or as a source tarball. Downloading and unpacking the latter needs less bandwidth but tarballs are not available for every milestone build, only for the latest release and the latest developer build, both available from our download site. If you want to work on a particular milestone or CWS you have to get the source directly from the SCM. OOo uses two SCMs: cvs for version 3.0.x and all older versions and subversion for all never OOo versions. See instructions for both of them below.

Once you have the source tree you can copy all the external files listed in the table above into the appropriate locations.

Whatever milestone (version) of OOo you want to use, never try to build the "HEAD" or "trunk" revision, always use milestone or CWS tags or branches! As new files are committed to HEAD quite often when workspaces are integrated into the main code lines it is very likely that you start to check it out while committing of files is still in progress. The result will be an incomplete and inconsistent version that most probably won't build. The OOo versioning works in a way that release engineers commit files to HEAD and give these files a version tag for the next milestone, e.g. “DEV300_m10”. Once this version is built and tested sucessfully it is announced to be usable for developers and the race is on for the next round.

If you want to know which milestones are current please look into our “Environment Information System” (EIS). There is an RSS feed available that informs you about new available milestones. You can also subscribe to the cws-announce@openoffice.org mailing list (or look into its archive).

EIS also provides a lot of other useful information and entry points to more documentation.

Using cvs (OOo version <= 3.0.x)

We have some documentation about working with cvs on OOo. Here's a short description how you can download the whole OOo2 source. You have to use the following commands to get e.g. the milestone m10 on the code line dev300 (with the cvs branch tag DEV300_m10):

export 'CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.services.openoffice.org:/cvs'
cvs login ( use the CVS password: anoncvs when you are asked for it)
cd SRC_ROOT
cvs co -r DEV300_m10 OpenOffice2

The alias “OpenOffice2” will check out all modules that are needed for OOo2.x, for or OOo3.x we have "OpenOffice3"; it is also possible to check out single modules. Checking out OpenOffice2 took me roughly an hour. If you already have a cvs tunnel working you can of course use this one instead of the anoncvs access I used in my example but anoncvs is much faster as it does not have the SSL overhead and latency.

If you got the tarball, e.g. the one for version 2.4.0, you can unpack it with

tar -xvzf Ooo_2.4.0_src.tar.gz

The great script from Kay Ramme that checks out any project or modules and – using the build lists of the modules and the dependencies created from them – all other modules that are needed for a successful build currently doesn't work for OOo3.x, but if you intend to work on a 2.x build it comes in very handy. It uses several parallel cvs connections (anoncvs allows to use 3) and so should be a bit faster. I used the script several times and it took roughly 40 minutes. But if you wanted to go the safe way or you want to work on the 3.0.x code line you should use the checkout via the “OpenOffice2” target.

Using subversion (OOo version >= 3.1.x)

Working with subversion on OOo is described elsewhere in the wiki. You will find instructions there how to check out CWS or milestones and how to handle them. Getting milestones or CWS is easy, as commands like

svn checkout svn://svn.services.openoffice.org/ooo/tags/DEV300_m42
svn checkout svn://svn.services.openoffice.org/ooo/cws/foo

should show. The svn URLs shown here use read-only access and so don't require ssh. If you want to have write access to the repository, you have to use URLs like

svn checkout svn+ssh://svn@svn.services.openoffice.org/ooo/cws/foo

(write access to milestone builds is neither necessary nor recommended!).

More about OOo, subversion and ssh can be found here.

Just a recommendation: if you change the version you are working on frequently, don't do complete checkouts all the time, instead of the use the "svn switch" command that only downloads the changes. After switching you should remove the output trees in all modules ( in SRC_ROOT that would be a "rm -rf */wntmsci12" command). At least the dependencies stored in the output trees may be invalid so you can't rely on them.

Setting up the build environment

Finally the “configure” tool is used to create the environment. It checks that all software, hardware, and system requirements for the build are satisfied, and creates configuration files called winenv.set (for tcsh) and winenv.set.sh (for bash) that are used to set all necessary build environment variables. If configure detects a problem it will stop and give you a useful (really!) hint how to fix it. You have to call “configure” from the SRC_ROOT/config_office directory.

The resulting configuration files are created in the SRC_ROOT directory. A top-level makefile script makefile.mk and the script bootstrap that are located in the config_office directory are moved into SRC_ROOT folder as well. This is due to technical reasons: The SRC_ROOT directory in the cvs tree can only hold directories. On the other hand, the top-level makefile.mk should logically be placed in the top-level directory SRC_ROOT. The cvs tree holds these files in config_office and configure copies them up. This has been changed on the 3.x code line, as subversion does not have this limitation. So if you are using a version of the DEV300 or OOo310 code line, you will find the "configure" script in SRC_ROOT, not in config_office (that has been removed in these versions).

Before running configure, make sure that all needed programs are in the system path or start configure with the appropriate command line switches. Make also sure that the PATH variable in your cygwin shell does not contain any blanks and quotes.

There are a number of options that you can use with the configure script. To display these options, type the following command:

./configure –help


Here's my configure call (the folders of the different programs of course might be different in your case):

./configure \
--disable-directx \
--with-cl-home="/cygdrive/d/develop/msvc/VC" \
--disable-activex \
--disable-atl \
--disable-build-mozilla \
--with-frame-home="/cygdrive/d/develop/MSDK/v6.1" \
--with-psdk-home="/cygdrive/d/develop/MSDK/v6.1" \
--with-midl-path="/cygdrive/d/develop/MSDK/v6.1/Bin" \
--with-asm-home="/cygdrive/d/develop/msvc/VC" \
--with-jdk-home="/cygdrive/d/develop/j2sdk1.4.2_11" \
--with-csc-path="/cygdrive/c/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v3.5" \
--with-ant-home=/ant \
--with-use-shell=bash

(the pathes containing "msvc" and "msdk" should be self-explanatory.)

Sometimes configure had problems with paths containing spaces (no pattern detected) so I preferred to install into pathes without them. Alternatively, feel free to install the various packages using the default path containing spaces and then use the mixed short path for the configure stage. The mixed short path can be obtained using Cygwin's cygpath tool, eg:

$ cygpath -m -s "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC"
c:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~1.0/VC

The "with-psdk-home" setting needs a case-sensitive path name. I recommend to use case-sensitive usage in all cases - it's good to get used to case sensitivity if you are going to work with Cygwin.

Most parameters are self-explanatory, but some options might need an explanation.

The Visual Studio Express compilers do not contain everything needed to build the OOo ActiveX control, OLE automation and native Windows OLE support, so I disabled it here. If you are using a “complete” Visual Studio (no “Express” version) you can omit this if you want. But the ActiveX control and the support for native OLE objects and OLE automation is not needed to run OOo, they are just an additional feature that lets OOo embed files into the Internet Explorer. On the 3.0.x code line and the 2008 Express compiler another step is necessary after configuring: the environment variable "DISABLE_ATL=TRUE" must be set in the shell and also (in case configure fails to detect the Windows platform SDK version correctly) WINDOWS_VISTA_PSDK also must be set to TRUE. [Remark: the detection failure results from the way how configure searches for the Vista PSDK: it will be found only if it is installed into the default location.] I manually added both variables to the winenv.set.sh file that was created by the "configure" call file. For all code lines since 3.1.x this has been fixed and both environment variables will be set properly.

As DirectX is not needed for most developers, its SDK consumes a lot of disk space and is prone to incompatibilities I recommend to build without DirecX support by using --disable-directx as shown above. Otherwise you have to provide the path to the SDK in --with-directx-home.

OOo uses some Mozilla components. As mentioned above it is not possible to build them from the sources using the Visual Studio 2005 compiler. So I disabled the build with an appropriate option. Disabling the Mozilla components with "--disable-mozilla" completely currently does not work due to a bug in the module dependencies.

Cygwin starts with a “bash” shell by default as already mentioned. My document explains how to build with this shell. Using a tcsh is possible though it may sometimes lead to problems (memory allocation errors, hanging builds) so I don't recommend to use it. Unfortunately using “tcsh” is still the default setting created by configure (as the first builds where done using it) and so I told configure that the bash should be used instead. If you want to try using tcsh remove the “--with-use-shell” parameter shown above and build with tcsh as explained below. In case the build breaks at some place you can manually patch your winenv.set.sh file and exchange the line

SHELL=”/usr/bin/tcsh”

with

SHELL=”/usr/bin/bash”

and the line

“USE_SHELL=”tcsh”

with

“USE_SHELL=”bash”

Then close the tcsh and build again with bash as explained below.

After running configure you must create the dmake make utility that is needed for the build of OpenOffice.org. This done from the SRC_ROOT directory by calling

./bootstrap

If you experiment with the newest sources from the SCM tree, mind that updates to the configure process may not happen via updates of configure (the script file) but via the files configure.in and set_soenv.in. The configure script itself is created from configure.in using the autoreconf command. The perl script set_soenv is created when you run configure from set_soenv.in.

If you need to modify or create a correct configure you would run commands like the following:

SRC_ROOT> cd config_office
config_office> cvs update configure.in
config_office> autoconf

to update the configure script. If you only use code from the snapshot releases on the web, you don't need to be concerned about this. If you are working on a Child Workspace you should rerun the configure script after each resync.

Build Instructions

Now you are ready to build OpenOffice.org. In every Cygwin instance used for building you have to set the environment variables from the generated configuration file(s).

If you are using bash got to your SRC_ROOT folder and call

. winenv.set.sh

or if you are using tcsh call

source winenv.set

Now you have two options to build the whole Office. You can either call “dmake” in SRC_ROOT or you can go to the “instsetoo_native” directory and use “build” that allows you to control the build process a bit better:

SRC_ROOT> cd instsetoo_native
SRC_ROOT> build --all -P4

The “-P4” tells the build tools to start 4 parallel running processes. Using more than one process will speed up the build as it avoids that CPU time is wasted waiting for disk i/o. As a rule of thumb twice as much processes as you have CPU cores is a good number, so “-P4” is fine for my dual core Athlon 64 X2. On this machine (described at the top of this document) the complete build took roughly 2,5-3 hours. The whole tree used 8,1GB after a successful build. The disk space required for OOO300_m7 grew to 10,7GB. Extra space is required if debugging, eg with debug symbols enabled on 5 projects it grew further to 16GB.

Some build times for comparison (as reported by users):

  • Athlon XP 64 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM - 3 hours
  • Athlon 1,15 GHz, 1 GB RAM - 18,5 hours
  • Core2 Duo 2 GHz, 1GB RAM - 3 hours
  • Core2 Quad 2,4 GHz, 4GB RAM - 1,5 hours

There are some special things in the way how OOo builds its modules. Every module has an “output” folder (with some subfolders for the different kinds of generated output) that is created the first time a build is done in the module. The name of this folder is “wntmsci10.pro” for builds with MSVC++2003, “wntmsci11.pro” for builds with MSVC++2005 and "wntmsci12.pro" for builds with MSVC++2008 (for the meaning of the "pro" extension see below). After a successful build of a module some of the generated files are copied to the output folder of the “solver” module by executing a tool called “deliver” (this is automatically called by build --all for each of the modules). Other modules will take these “delivered” files (header files, libraries etc.) to resolve their dependencies. The content of the solver module will also be used to pack the installation sets in the final step.

Sometimes a build breaks. You will get an error message that tells you which modules have to be rebuilt. It seems that at least on Windows in rare cases the build (especially a multi processor build) breaks without an obvious reason and redoing the build is enough to “fix” the problem. I didn't experience that in the last months but don't be surprised if it happens to you. Of course a build can break for “real” reasons also if you changed something in the source code. “build” will always tell you the modules it couldn't build successfully and you can then go to any folder inside the module(s) and fix the problems.

The build system recommends to use the “--from” parameter of the build command to continue the build where it broke after you have fixed the problem. Rumours are that this is not reliable everytime. So if you can bear the extra minutes that “build” needs to detect already built modules you should restart your build with “build --all” from inside instsetoo_native as you did the first time just to avoid uncertainties. For more options of “build” call

SRC_ROOT> build – help

After a successful build you will find the OOo installation set in

instsetoo_native/wntmscixx.pro/OpenOffice/msi/Install/en-US

“instsetoo_native” is the module that packs the installation set.

If you already have a version of OOo installed you can install your freshly built version in parallel by installing it with setup /a that just unpacks all files without any system registration.

If you decide to rebuild a module or build each module individually (mind dependencies!), you also will have to use the “build” tool from inside a folder of these modules. A “build” of a single module will not call “deliver” automatically as described above for the “build --all” case. You must call is manually to get the usual files copied to the solver tree so that other modules or the packaging module can use them.

SRC_ROOT/(module)> build
SRC_ROOT/(module)> deliver

You can copy all new files manually to the appropriate places in your installation. There's no need to rebuild and install the complete installation set if you only want to rebuild some parts.

Special Debug Builds with --enable-dbgutil

OpenOffice.org can be built in a "non-pro" version where special debug assertions are enabled ("pro" means "product"). This is supported for Windows/Cygwin starting with the m218 milestone of the SRC680 codeline and all released code lines starting with OOo 2.3.

To enable this kind of build you must add the "--enable-dbgutil" switch to your "configure" command line. If you are building with a MSVC++2005 or MSVC++2008 compiler and you didn't disable the mozilla parts you will also need the debug DLLs for the MSVC2003 compiler runtime, msvcr71d.dll and msvcp71d.dll. You can download them from the internet and copy them into the external/msvcp71 folder.

In milestones older than SRC680m223 you also have to change the d.lst file in the external/prj folder. Add the following lines:

..\msvcp71\msvcp71d.dll %_DEST%\bin%_EXT%\msvcp71d.dll

..\msvcp71\msvcr71d.dll %_DEST%\bin%_EXT%\msvcr71d.dll

You can build the non-pro version in the same source tree as the pro-version, all created files go into wntmsci10, wntmsci11 or wntmsci12 folders, without the "pro" extension as in case of the "normal" builds.

When you work with the non-pro version you might see some error messages or warnings at runtime. In most cases you can safely assume that you have found a bug. The non-pro version is a bit slower than the pro version.

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