Apache OpenOffice Building Guide

Preface

This guide will help you to build Apache OpenOffice from its source code. It details the prerequisites and explains how to download the source code, prepare and then run the build.

This document is loosely based on an older, now deprecated, version.

Getting help

You can get help by searching this wiki or by asking questions on the developers mailing list.

You can help us improve this guide by pointing out any errors (preferably after finding a solution.)

Basics

In order to build Apache OpenOffice you need a proper environment. This includes

• a command line interpreter, typically a bash shell (although sh should be enough) inside a terminal.
• C++ compiler and linker. The exact choice depends on the operating system.
• Perl interpreter and several modules.
• Many tools from the Unix world like make or sed.

The exact list of requirements will be detailed on operating specific sub pages. Note that while some of these tools come pre-installed with the Linuxes, FreeBSD, Mac, Solaris etc. you will need to install Cygwin to provide them on Windows.

Getting the source

The source code is available as SVN repository at https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/ooo.

Check it out with

  svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/ooo/trunk ooo

More details can be found here.

Organization of the source and output tree

The source code has four top level directories:

main

contains most of the so called modules. Each module typically provides one or more libraries. The source code of the writer application for example can be found in main/sd/.

ext_libraries

is the new home of modules that build external libraries (libraries maintained outside of Apache OpenOffice and often outside Apache).

ext_sources

contains the tar balls (archives) of external libraries. They are included both for convenience and to make sure that specific versions remain available. Note that the source tar ball does not contain any external tar ball.