Hi. FYI: as I informed a while ago, I made a project proposal for OSU capstone.
The project has been selected, so we will have 4 students working the next months to achieve the following: http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/capstone/viewproposal2013.php?id=16 extract from above: motivation: "Apache OpenOffice is the biggest open source office package, with 65 milllion downloads of our last version. A number of other open source packages are derived from OpenOffice, and incorporates patches and enhancements from AOO. The AOO source code is very big, 121 languages, 233 modules and 2933 makefiles (including sub-makefiles). As programming platform, we use C++ (bulk part), Java, Python, Perl and some special libraries The build system is old, a combination of perl and dmake, and has grown over the years into a non standard, hard to understand non documented system. At the same time, we want to attract more developers, therefore we want to make a new build system based on modern technology, which are easy to use especially for windows developers." goal: "The goal is to: 1) make a build system suitable for use with microsoft visual studio 2) make a build system suitable for use on linux (makefiles) One of those systems should be the primary one and the other one should be automatically generated. The team must first understand how the current system works in general, and then build scenarios how a \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\"perfect\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\" system would look like. Second task is to implement it, in parallel with the existing system Third task is to help test it on the different platforms we support. " I will mentor the students, but hope that the community will be behind me and help as well. If the students turn out to be motivated they can, as volunteers and committers, be a real bonus for the project. Another apache committer who lives close to the OSU have promised to help me as well. I am aware there are very different ideas about how a new build system should look like, but lets use this possibility to get moving, if the result works it cannot be less "nice" than the current system. are anybody with knowledge of build.pl etc. interested in helping out ? rgds jan I.
