GSoC Week 1

[Tor Lillqvist]

> you mean, with 10.000 lines of changes per week, in the fine tradition
> of OpenOffice.org?  :-P

That is a possibility, yes. *I* don't need it, and I assume GSoC
students don't need it either, they should be capable of building and
installing automake and autoconf.

(Another possibility is to keep the pre-generated configure script on
the web and download it when necessary.)

But we need more Mac-knowledgeable developers to make LO into a better
app on the Mac, don't we? And we want to make it as easy as possible
for them to start hacking on the actual code. Now when it is possible
to build LO with the *current* Xcode (one doesn't need to hunt for the
obsolete, ever more difficult to find and difficult to install, Xcode
3), we are a big step in that direction. Our principle has always been
that for the Mac one shouldn't need any 3rd-party software. But now
when Apple in their wisdom (or by accident) stopped including automake
and autoconf in Xcode, that isn't true any more.

Consider some Mac-savvy developer with a slight interest in FLOSS, who
tries LO and notices some of the many things that are a bit broken on
the Mac. "Oh, I could try to fix that", would be the reaction we want,
right? So source is downloaded, some getting started wiki pages read,
and then ./autogen.sh stops with a missing aclocal. "aclocal, never
heard of that, must be some Linux crack, oh well, I have other things
to do".

--tml