Modularization

... by now OOo has been regarded as the only real alternative office suite, sometimes hard to build, often admired for its feature completeness, somewhat beaten because of the memory footprint, understood to have one of the most classical graphical user interfaces ever, loved to recover MS documents, and so on ...

The Modularization Project

Many words may be used for OOo, though small is not with them :-) OOo is a huge project, with lots of code and a more or less monolithic architecture.

It seems a hero (or five) is needed ... we (Cynthia, Xiuzhi, LiuTao, Ingo and I) want to move out to fill this position ...

... to Improve and Support Modularization of OOo.

Goals

The Goals are:

• Adapt the OOo source to enable (more) custom-tailor products.
• Support custom-tailor products in the build system by
  • checking out what is needed only,
  • building what is needed only,
  • re-using intermediate or final deliverables.
• Enable pre-build intermediates and their usage.

Todos

And this is what we want to do first:

• Create a "build helper", responsible for
  • getting the source,
  • getting prerequisites and pre-builds,
  • configuring the sources, taking care of dependencies ...,
  • and (optionally) building it.
• Add missing/useful configuration switches (e.g. for headless support).
• Re-factor according to needs (e.g. writer only etc.).

This "build helper" may be compared to the Linux kernels menuconfig / xconfig, first configure it extensively, ideally in a graphical way, than build it.

Outlook

Later on we may

• rework SCP to configure the sources more dynamically,
• provide pre-build intermediates to reduce build times for many,
• disentangle the OOo applications, and
• do even more ...

Other Links

IRCLOGS
Original wiki page of modularization Here comes more goals