Non Product Build

A so-called Non-Product Build of OpenOffice.org is one that contains a lot of additional diagnostics and debug code, which is available in this special mode only. Such a build is usually larger and slower than an ordinary Product Build (which basically means: every build you ever downloaded from OpenOffice.org), but is very useful for developers.

Currently, Non-Product Builds are probably rarely used outside the Hamburg development team (which might be because the facilities are widely unknown).

Non-Product Builds are created using a special configure switch, namely --enable-dbgutil.

The most visible feature of Non-Product Builds are so-called assertions - Basically message boxes popping up, and saying that something went not the way the developer expected it to go. Such assertions are considered bugs, and as such should be reported in IssueZilla, with the summary starting with "ASSERT:" or "ERROR:" (since ERROR: is used by most of the assertion message boxes themself).

To use (or do QA for) the additional debug features: just run OO.o, and when it's in full-flow, press <Alt>-<Shift>-<Control> 'D' in that order; this should popup a debugging options window. The debugging options are subsequently saved to the .dbgsv.init file for the next run (you can control the location of that with e.g. export DBGSV_INIT=$(HOME)/.dbgsv.init), it is (unfortunately) a binary file.

Try the help integrated into the debugging options window to see what features it offers.