Official builds for aarch64 Linux?

[Pawel Moll]

Greetings,

As my email address suggests I work for Arm, in particular on making sure our engineers can do their work using Arm technology.

I've been recently contacted by our IT people who were asked to provide aarch64 aka "arm64" LibreOffice on our compute clusters. When asked to do this in the past for x86 nodes, they've just taken the official (x86) builds from libreoffice.org and deployed them as modules. But, they said, there wasn't a Linux aarch64 version available...

Long story short, because I know it generally works (if nothing else, I use Ubuntu-provided LO on my aarch64 workstation) I've gone and build it myself, based on the wiki instructions. There were 2 small problems on the and some unit tests are failing (innocently at the first sight), but the result seems good enough for now for the user who asked for it. That made me think, though, along the lines of:

What would it take to see official builds happening for aarch64 Linux?

Of course the small issues I mentioned would have to be ironed out, but that is not a big problem I think and I can make it happen one way or another (although will have some questions on the way). I also looked closer at the information on wiki and I see that the CI system uses a collection of Tinderboxes as builder systems (so I assume it would have to be an official Tinderbox for an official build, but I'm not sure what makes them "official"?). Is there something else? Any fundamental problems that must be addressed first?

Best regards

Paweł