Experiences building LO from scratch as a "new" developer

[Caolán McNamara]

On Thu, 2017-08-03 at 17:10 +0200, Mike Saunders wrote:
>  sudo apt-get build-dep libreoffice
> 
> An error comes up: "E: You must put some 'source' URIs in your
> sources.list". I Googled the error and fixed this by checking "Source
> code" in the software-properties-gtk tool

This used to be unnecessary, this changed in the Ubuntu/Debian
distribution at some point to not include the Source repositories by
default. That part of the docs precede that change so needs to be
updated.

> 4. Next is this bullet point:
> 
> "With modern releases, use autogen to select a newer gstreamer, or
> install the old package with: sudo apt install libgstreamer0.10-dev
> libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev"

I think configure will now try to build against gstreamer-1.0 and
gstreamer-0.1 and just pick whatever combo is possible to build against
so I think we can remove this line from the docs and rely on the
earlier lines that install the default dependencies of the distribution
libreoffice build to install something suitable.

> It looks like this fixes the problem I encountered earlier, in the
> first step of BuildingOnLinux, but I wasn't told until now.

Possibly the author of that bit wasn't brave enough to edit the
toplevel build page, feel free to edit the toplevel yourself to insert
some suitable step to enable the source repos under Ubuntu

> But I don't know how to do that, and I can't recall using autogen to
> select anything; I only installed gstreamer1.0-libav. I try entering
> "autogen" but I'm told it's not installed. Looking back in
> Linux_Build_Dependencies, I see "When you use autogen.sh" under the
> "Older Ubuntu" section - but the previous page said "With *modern*
> releases, use autogen"

If, after removing the gstreamer selection stuff, there's any mention
of autogen/autogen.sh then the correct scriptname that should be used
throughout is autogen.sh.

I think buovjaga is going to make some changes here along these lines