How to compile Calc

Tor Lillqvist tml at iki.fi
Wed Feb 8 06:39:04 PST 2012


It's best to avoid the word "project" completely as it has so many
different meanings. For instance, many people accustomed to using IDEs
for all aspects of software development would say a "project" is
something you open in an IDE (like Visual Studio or Xcode) and design,
edit, build and debug there. LibreOffice has no such "projects".

In LibreOffice, the source code is stored in a distributed version
control (Git). Git has *repositories*. When you *clone* that
("checkout" has a slightly different meaning in Git), you get a local
repository, and the actual files in a tree with lot of subdirectories.

These subdirectories are usually called "modules", but don't read too
much meaning into that word. "Module" can mean many different things.
In the LibreOffice codebase, a "module" is simply one of the top-level
subdirectories. The code in one "module" is used to build one or
several (shared) libraries (and in some cases, executables). In
general, we have too many libraries, and we want to eventually reduce
their number a lot.

LibreOffice's object system (UNO) has *components*, don't confuse
those with the "modules".

You need to clone the "core" repository, and build most of LibreOffice
in order to work on the code. Some things will be left out by default
like the "binfilter" code, unless you specifically ask for it.

You didn't say what operating system you are using, or which web pages
you are looking at. For all we know, you might be following some
outdated instructions...

--tml


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