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The Free and Open Productivity Suite
Released: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15

Building OpenOffice.org 1.x.y under Windows with 4NT

The build instructions for versions prior to OpenOffice.org 1.1 RC, this includes the OO64x and OOo 1.0.x family and the OpenOffice.org 1.1 beta versions, can be found here!

This document describes the requirements and actions that you need to build OpenOffice.org on Windows.

Commands you have to type on the keyboard follow this syntax throughout this document: 

D:\my\source> winenv.bat

In this example, the script winenv.bat is executed in the directory D:\my\source under a 4NT shell. Unless stated otherwise, all commands appearing in this document should be entered from a 4NT shell (the exception is the configure script which has to be run from a cygwin bash shell). $SRC_ROOT will denote the directory in which the source code of OpenOffice.org is stored.

Basically, there is the choice to build OpenOffice.org from two different branches: a stable branch, which results in the release version, or a less stable developer branch (latest release see here). Links to the different sources are given in the document.




Table of Contents




Overview

This section is meant as a reminder or checklist for those who have some experience in building OpenOffice.org. Everybody else should jump to the Build Requirements section.

Even experienced builders are well advised to check the release notes at http://download.openoffice.org/index.html and the section Build Requirements in this document to inform yourself about changes since the previous releases.

Detailed step-by-step build descriptions are given from the next section on.

You can perform a full build, or you can build an individual project using a prebuilt version.

Overview of Performing a Full Build

To perform a full build, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Get the source code, either from the download webpage (http://download.openoffice.org/index.html) or alternatively via a check-out from the cvs tree against a release tag, e.g. cws_srx644_ooo11beta.
  2. Run the configure script in a cygwin bash shell to check all requirements and to create the script winenv.bat.
  3. Run the winenv.bat (under 4NT) script to set all environment variables.

    Please see the last screen from the configure script for more specific information on setting up for your platform.

  4. Build typing dmake in $SRC_ROOT, or build --all in the instsetoo module, or build followed by deliver in the individual modules.
For detailed build instructions, see the section Building a Full Build of the Office Suite in this document. The installation procedure is described at the end of this document.

Overview of Building an Individual Project

You can use a prebuilt version to build an individual project. Having a prebuilt version is necessary because the individual project you want to build could depend on other projects. A project builds a particular component of OpenOffice.org. For example, the Word Processing project builds the Word Processing application. To build an individual project, you must follow these steps:

  1. Download the appropriate solver tarballs from the download webpage (http://download.openoffice.org/index.html) e.g., for 643B the solver tarball solver643B_win32intel.tar.gz.

    643 is a very old release. Please use the latest version.

  2. Check out the modules for the project that you want to build from the OpenOffice.org cvs tree. If your project uses the resources module, res, check out this module also. You can, of course, also download the entire source from the download webpage (http://download.openoffice.org/index.html). However, it is not possible to download individual modules there.
  3. Check out the module config_office. This is always necessary to create the build environment.
  4. Also check out the module solenv.
  5. Unpack the solver tarball in the $SRC_ROOT directory.
  6. Run the configure script in a cygwin bash shell to check all requirements and to create the script winenv.bat.

    Note that all paths should NOT contain spaces. This will confuse dmake later.

  7. Run winenv.bat to set all environment variables.
  8. Build each module against the prebuilt solver using the build tool, followed by deliver.
For detailed build instructions, see Building Individual Projects with a Prebuilt.


Build Requirements

Before you start building, you must ensure that your system satisfies the recommended software and hardware requirements for the type of system you are working on. For Windows, these are as follows:

Build Requirements

Hardware Requirements

External Components

The code contains some further external components which are already provided. If you are interested in details about these, look at the External Components webpage at http://tools.openoffice.org/ext_comp.html.




Get the source code

You have two options to get the source code:




Generating the Build Environment and Build Tools

Ideally, in keeping with the principles of open source, you would use an open source shell to build on a computer running a Win32 operating system. However, this is still experimental (you chose the safe way). You decided to use a non-open source shell to build on a computer running a Win32 operating system: the 4NT command shell.

On the other hand, the bash shell from the cygwin tools is needed to run the configure script which generates the build environment. The configure script checks that all software, hardware, and system requirements for the build are satisfied, and it creates a configuration file called winenv.bat that you then execute to set all necessary build environment variables. We demonstrate a sample run below.

This configuration file will be moved into the SRC_ROOT directory. A top-level makefile script makefile.mk will be moved into SRC_ROOT as well. This is due to technical reasons: The SRC_ROOT directory in the cvs tree can only hold directories. On the other hand, the top-level makefile.mk should logically be placed in the top-level directory SRC_ROOT. The cvs tree holds these files in config_office and configure copies them up.

The following should demonstrate in detail what steps have to be done to set up the environment:

You should exit the bash shell. Now you can run the environment settings file winenv.bat from your 4NT shell.

Note the change in pathname notation. Since the cygwin bash shell won't accept backslashes, paths have to be typed in a cygwin bash notation which is /cygdrive/c/path/to/file, instead of C:\path\to\file. This may appear confusing at the moment, but sticking to this notation will work.

There are a number of further options that you can use with the configure script. To display these options, type the following command: 

config_office> bash configure --help

After running configure you have to execute the configuration file which sets all environment variables. The generated file is called winenv.bat.

If you experiment with newest sources from the cvs-tree, mind that updates to the configure process may not happen via updates of configure (the script file) but via the files configure.in and set_soenv.in. The configure script itself is created from configure.in using the autoreconf command. The perl script set_soenv is created when you run configure from set_soenv.in.

If you need to modify or create a correct configure you would run commands like the following: 

$SRC_ROOT> cd config_office
config_office> cvs update configure.in
get a bash shell
config_office>bash autoconf
exit the bash shell

To update the configure script. If you only use code from the snapshot releases on the web, you don't need to be concerned about this.


Build Instructions

Building a Full Build of the Office Suite

Now you are ready to build OpenOffice.org. To build the entire suite, all you have to do (after having created the environment as described above) is to run dmake from the top-level directory. This may take several hours. 
$SRC_ROOT> dmake

If you decide to rebuild a module or build each module individually (mind dependencies!), you will have to use the build tool. A subsequent deliver will copy all created binaries, libraries etc. into the solver tree: 

$SRC_ROOT/(module)> build
$SRC_ROOT/(module)> deliver

The following table shows the time required to build on a system with a particular specification. You can use these details to estimate the time required to build on your system.

Architecture Intel
Processor Pentium III
Processor speed 600 MHz
RAM 256 MB
Hard Disk 6 GB SCSI
Time ~10 h

Building Individual Projects with a Prebuilt

OpenOffice.org is organised in several projects. For example, the Word Processing Project. These in turn consist of several modules, organised in separate directories. The source contains approximately 90 modules.

You can build any project or module individually. Building modules individually should not be misunderstood as reducing OpenOffice.org to a special application, say, for instance, the spreadsheet application. The program will always consist of the entire office suite: text processor, spreadsheet, drawing application, etc. Building individual modules comes in handy if you want to develop on a certain module. Most modules will depend on other modules to be already built. In other words, all modules must build in a particular order. To avoid building all modules which are prerequisites of the module of your interest, you can make use of a prebuilt solver tree against which you can build any module.

For more information on modules and on the sequence that they build in, and on the dependencies, see tools.openoffice.org/modules.html.

You have to download the solver tree as a tarball. For example solver643B_win32int.tar.gz from the Download page at http://download.openoffice.org/index.html, use a current release 643 is very old and only used as an example, and unpack it in the $SRC_ROOT directory, e.g.: 




$SRC_ROOT> tar -xvzf solver643B_win32int.tar.gz
In order to create the build environment and build tools, you also have to check out the config_office module and solenv.

To build a project, you build each of its modules individually in their directory with the build tool, followed by deliver to copy the created libraries, binaries etc. into the solver tree: 

$SRC_ROOT/(module-name)> build
$SRC_ROOT/(module-name)> deliver
Files called build.lst in the directories (module-name)/prj contain all information about the subdirectories to be build (each of them containing makefiles makefile.mk), about internal dependencies, and also about modules the current module depends on. The files (module-name)/prj/d.lst control the actions done by deliver. The last or second to last directory to be build is usually module-name/util which is responsible for linking one or more shared libraries.


Building a Project with Debug Information

To rebuild a complete project with debug information, remove all object files by removing the wntmsci7.pro directory. Then run build with the debug option set to true: 

$SRC_ROOT/(module)> rm -rf wntmsci9.pro
$SRC_ROOT/(module)> build debug=true



Instructions to Build an Installation Set

The build process (started with a top-level dmake or build --all in $SRC_ROOT/instsetoo) will create installation sets in English and German. A simple build in $SRC_ROOT/instsetoo will also create the installation sets, provided all other modules are already built.

If you have built an installation set earlier and want to re-build it, please delete the local outpath first: 

$SRC_ROOT/instsetoo> rm -rf wntmsci7.pro

The English installation set will be located at $SRC_ROOT/instsetoo/wntmsci7.pro/01/normal. Execute the setup binary to install: 

$SRC_ROOT> cd instsetoo/wntmsci7.pro/01/normal
normal> setup.exe
The 01 in the path names indicates that the localisation is American English. This number corresponds to the international phone code for the USA. The German installation set will be located in a subdirectory 49. This scheme holds true for all localisations you may have chosen explicitly (see next section Building Localised Versions of OpenOffice.org).

For a network installation, use the -net option to setup. Details on the network installation process can be found at http://installation.openoffice.org/proposals/netinstall.html in the installation project webpage.

For information on creating an automated installation script and create a response file.




Building Localised Versions of OpenOffice.org

Running the configure script with the --with-lang option will introduce the build of additional language resources. This option will introduce a command in the environment settings file which in turn after execution sets a variable like, for instance, RES_FREN to TRUE in the case of french (You can also set this variable by hand in order to introduce another language). It is also possible to build more than one language at once. One language resource, however, will not be introduced that way: the help content! Clicking on 'help' would still open English help documents.

There is no automatic procedure yet to implement non-English help, but the additional manual effort is rather minimal: After building the source as described above, but before building the installation set, a zip-file with all help-content for the language of choice has to be unzipped into the directory 

$SRC_ROOT/solver/641/wntmsci7.pro/pck.

The filenames of these files contain a number code for the language, corresponding to the international phone code of a country in which that language is mainly spoken. For instance, the file helpcontent_34_wnt.zip contains all help content for the Spanish localisation. The zipfiles themselves are available at ftp.services.openoffice.org/pub/OpenOffice.org/contrib/helpcontent/.

Having unzipped the helpcontent files in there, building of installation sets can be resumed or repeated (in case you already have build some), as described in the previous chapter. English installation sets will be located in

$SRC_ROOT/instsetoo/wntmsci7.pro/01/normal,
where 01 corresponds to the international phone code of the USA. If you have chosen, for instance, French (by configuring with the --with-lang=FREN option) you will find an additional directory called 33: 
$SRC_ROOT/instsetoo/wntmsci7.pro/33/normal.

Similarly, you will find 49 for German, 34 for Spanish, etc.

Localised help content is not yet available for all languages. In such cases, the English helpcontent will appear in the installations. For instance, when Danish is set with configure, you will find installation sets under the directory 45, but the help files will appear in English.




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