Building LibreOffice

These notes complement the information on http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development

• build/ and rawbuild/ missing after ./download:
  • If you only followed the instructions on the wiki page, the build/ and rawbuild/ directories are not there
  • as suggested at the end of the ./download step, you should run make in the loroot directory: this step has now been added to the instructions

• Package requirements (gnome-vfs-2.0 >= 2.6.0 ) were not met: No package 'gnome-vfs-2.0' found:
  • install libgnomevfs2-dev.
• Qt headers not found:
  • the packages to install are (the first addds most of the rest as dependencies, but not all):
    • libqt3-mt-dev
    • libqt3-headers
    • libqt3-compat-headers
    • qt3-dev-tools
    • qt3-apps-dev
• KDE headers not found:
  • install kdelibs-dev
• cannot find JUnit 4 jar:
  • install junit4 (not junit)

• This initial build is really long: on a Q6600 with 4 GB RAM, it took almost five hours. YMMV, but that first build will certainly take several hours and will at times eat all resources on your machine, to the point of making applications look stuck. On IRC, mmeeks confirms this is a reasonable duration to expect.
• Later builds are much faster, thanks to the incremental recompiling allowed by the make-based build process. On the same machine,
  • building a later dev version of LibreOffice m10 after building the previous one only took about 45 minutes.
  • rebuilding the same version of m10 takes about 12 minutes, just to walk the dependencies, make sure nothing changed, and still repackage the same results (WTF ?)