[Libreoffice] Help regarding build from source

[Katarina Machalkova]

Hey,

> I'm a computer science student and want to get into the libre office
> development. I went on to IRC # libre office channel for sometime and got
> help regarding the git repository cloning and have fetched the source code.

Welcome on board! :-)

> I already have Libreoffice installed on my ubuntu 10.04 system using PPA;
> so if I try to buld it libre office from the source which I just fetched
> will it affect the existing installation of libre office.

No, doesn't necessarily have to ...

> Do I need to remove the pre exesting libre office before I start building
> from source ?

... and no, not at all.
You can have your own (development/debugging) instance of LibO running from 
the fetched source tree. Issuing 'make dev-install' after building with 'make' 
will create such instance for you, it will then live in 
/wherever/libo/source/tree/is/install/program/

B.