invention

Just leaving to go to a training camp for the Swahili Localization Project in Arusha, Tanzania ... should be fun but already missing Danielle and James and I haven't left yet!

Will be quite a comprehensive training camp and I'll be doing a session on using the translate tools for localizing Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc...

Worked quite a bit on ooo-build stuff the last two days.

Got cvs access sorted out so I can add my patches directly.

Got a full + complete build working on Fedora using src680-m55 with ooo-build head. Started trying to get it going with mingw.

Realised I was messing up passing configure options to configure in my dobuild script. This meant that trying to recompile and switch from kde back to gtk was fruitless. Have run a new build and looks a bit better now...

Took a while to sort out mingw (mostly because of above config options), leaving it building now. Haven't got ccache working there yet (gets confused about paths) but that will help a lot. Anyway, just leave it and see if it builds tonight. (Note: CLASSPATH was set to something that caused problems with ant). Only have 400MB free on my Windows machine so building on a Samba share, will probably make it even slower

In fact it fails to build stlport. So I probably need to look at the 1.1.x cws for mingw and see if I can get that going...

Well I've been trying to build OOo 680 (2.x series) using ooo-build, which doesn't quite work yet.

I'm putting the patches I'm using at http://davidf.sjsoft.com/files/ooo-2.x-patches/ along with a patch to apply to say what to use, what not to use.

Hopefully it will build someday ...

I didn't have a laptop at OOoCon 2004 and didn't manage to write anything in detail then, and have been busy since, so this is my executive summary...

Was fantastic meeting loads of different people, lots of whom I've been in contact with before but not met in real life... and attending some great sessions. For me the discussions afterwards were often the best part. Was able to make some contributions about how difficult the localization process currently is, and what we could do to improve it. Also a lot of discussion on how to make it easier for developers / others to contribute to OpenOffice.org.

Javier Sola who runs the Khmer project in Cambodia: he uses our translation tools and says that in fact they're the only viable way to translate Mozilla into Khmer and other languages that use Indic scripts. Was fantastic to see the depth and breadth of the project - translated Firefox and Thunderbird, nearly finished OpenOffice.org, has developed a public domain Khmer Unicode font, and is writing lots of documentation on the localization process, using our tools as a basis. Were staying in the same place and on the first afternoon, managed to bash out a final version of moz2po / po2moz so that you can do a round-trip from xpi to po and back again.

Pavel Jan�k has been absolutely fantastic doing our OpenOffice.org builds for us, so it was nice to meet him finally and say thank you, though I'm still not sure he realizes what a help it is. Since the conference we're now working on getting our tools working with OOo 2.0 and generating PO files automatically for all languages...

Various people from Sun were there, including Eike Rathke, Joerg Barfurth, Ingo Schmidt, and others... Was great to hear about new features for OOo 2.0, especially the new installers and how they will be able to produce language packs etc.

Michael Meeks did a great session on building the developer community, at which I signed a JCA, thus making all the patches I'd previously had integrated legal

Dan Williams did a talk looking at various possibilities of migrating the OpenOffice.org resource system to be a loadable-on-demand XML based system, possibly with caching. This would be great and could make localization a lot simpler by splitting out the text strings into a separate file for each language that could be replaced on demand.

Caolan McNamara ran through debugging/profiling techniques for OpenOffice.org and how to make them work as God intended.

Chris Halls, the Debian maintainer for OpenOffice.org, suggested ways to simplify the build process - breaking down the source into manageable parts, not including external libraries, providing the build tools as binaries, etc. Man, I want all that yesterday!

Had a great discussion at a Chinese restaurant with cph and Jacqueline McNally on ways to make it easier for new developers to get involved. Going to have READMEs for each module - yay. Also suggested having janitorial / TODO lists like the Wine project does.

All in all, was a fantastic conference, and really glad I was able to go.

God answers prayer. Going to OOoCon 2004 despite it initially seeming unlikely.

Brief summary of information I gathered in the process of booking lots of different flights over a few days:

The German Embassy / Consulate in Cape Town has moved. Their new address details are as follows:

19th floor
Safmarine House
22 Riebeck Street
Cape Town
phone: +27 21 4053000

British Airways Executive Club miles: You can buy airmiles for yourself, or others. They cost $28 (USD) each, plus a $25 transaction fee. If you buy for others, you can buy for up to three people at once but only pay a single transaction fee. But you can't include yourself in the list of recipients! So to buy for me and Danielle, I had to login as my dad and purchase the miles for us in his name...

pyfly: I started working on a Python script to do screenscraping of airline's reservation systems. So far only implemented flysaa but it would be nice to do others. Basically you can specify a date range and see all the flights in the given range and their prices, much easier than doing it manually.

Finally finished the OpenOffice.org multilanguage builds, as in we have a master CD ready.

This involved doing stuff to make it add menu items to KDE and Gnome, and handling recurring bugs with wx and python expat versions clashing... also found some things like templates were missing and got those done too.

And now have a spiffy language switcher that looks quite nice (simple mode very easy, click More to get all the options...).

All will released on sourceforge as 1.1.3-build-9-2 once uploading is finished...

Now hopefully I can sort out my Inbox which is too big to fit onto a CD without compression ...

There is a new multilingual build of OOo 1.1.3 available on sourceforge At the moment, it is only available on Linux, Windows builds will be done on the weekend.

This build contains Afrikaans, Northern Sotho, Tswana and Zulu. All the languages will be installed. The translations are almost all up to date with latest translate cvs (Zulu has had a few additions) Note that this is the first public Tswana release!

Instructions:

• download the build
• untar
• cd into the folder
• ./setup-xx will run the setup program in language xx
• once it is installed, you can use the program ooswitchlang in the OpenOffice.org/program directory to switch the languages
• on linux, ooswitchlang requires Python and wxPython to be installed (note English isn't available in this build even though listed).
• we'll try simplify ooswitchlangs interface soon. On Windows it will be a standalone executable
• you have to quit openoffice and restart to switch languages

Only a multilingual build is available to persuade everyone to test that rather than single language builds, but these will be made available later. Everyone who wants to help test - please download and give feedback...

This is actually testing a number of things:

• compatibility of linux build with various platforms
• the latest translations
• the multilingual setup

Feedback on any of the above is helpful, esp the multilingual setup. the more detail the better!

I have now fixed most of the issues with multilingual install sets for OpenOffice.org (menu items stuck in a language, needing to edit the config files after the install) so we should be able to do a test release soon...

Finally worked out today how to get the OpenOffice.org setup program to display in the right language - was fairly simple, just set the Locale in Linux via LANG or in Windows via the control panel. In Windows, we need to manually edit the registry as Zulu and Sipedi / Northern Sotho aren't listed languages...

However got frustrated again with the OpenOffice.org code base ... the reason our languages aren't selectable from the list in the setup program, is that they have yet another list of languages defined there ... so we need to patch it. Any program should have exactly one list of languages or better still, use a common list shared with other programs...

Over the last few days, got a Python script going that merges the setup scripts for OpenOffice.org setups so we can create a multilingual installation with all the Southern African languages so far... Still needs a bit of tweaking but most of it is working. For some reason the installer seems to choose the language with the lowest dialing code, so I'll have to either include English or teach lots of people Northern Sotho

Discovered its possible to combine multiple languages in one OpenOffice.org installation. Just no user interface at the moment to select the language. But managed to manually produce a English/Zulu version with only a few glitches. We should produce a South African version with all the languages so far included...

Pavel's build system also produces debug builds which add a reference number for each string. This is really nice as we can quickly look up any untranslated/mistranslated string in the GSI file and then in the PO file (which led me to discover that the Send command on the file menu should be Stuur and isn't coming through for some reason...). Thanks Pavel!

The installation bitmap is now replaced properly in our builds, so branding support is complete. Also more work on my rebuild script so it remerges the original files (as debug versions are left behind).

My OpenOffice.org patches work, we have a nice splash screen (Fixed a problem with my mods to the build system where it was trying to get the patches from the wrong directory). The intro screen didn't come through though, so had to do a patch to scp/source/office/files.scp too.

In the process also defined a rebuild script for when I'm doing tweaking, so I don't have to unpack the source and do everything from scratch just to test a change.

OK, I now have OpenOffice.org building nice English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Northern Sotho builds on Linux. Remaining issues:

• The license and readme files aren't being handled correctly for the non-English builds
• Character encoding problems (which I thought were fixed ; perhaps the gsi files are old)
• OpenOffice.org installs don't like installing more than one copy of the same version which is essential for testing multiple languages
• some translation fixing...

Well it would be nice if it would build. But localize tends to introduce horrible bugs.

The way this works is that for some bizarre reason localizations are merged into text-format resource files. If I can bear it I'll try describe the system some time. But the point it that the tool that merges them sometimes messes it up and produces invalid files. So the build system has a script that fixes some of them and a patch that fixes others. Of course, the patch won't work if you don't have exactly the same set of languages and gsi files... <Sigh/>

I'll try again another day.