It has been done.
There isn't much more to say about the long outstanding dmake removal from the LibreOffice build system than what Björn Michaelsen described in detail except one thing that sprang to my mind when seeing the final commit that removed 93554 lines: it's all red and it's so good.
The introduction of more restrictive date acceptance patterns in LibreOffice 3.6 (see earlier blog entries here and here) generated quite some discussion whether the change was good or bad. The fact that not all locales had patterns for incomplete (only day and month) date input added to their data also added some angry voices.
Independent from that there was one thing overlooked: users want to be able to input dates using the numeric keypad and in locales with a '.' dot date separator that was not possible anymore because usually then there is no dot on the keypad due to the decimal separator being different. That certainly needed to be addressed.
There is no way to satisfy everyone with a default set of patterns, I therefore implemented a Date acceptance patterns edit field in the Tools→Options→LanguageSettings→Languages dialogue that follows the selected locale and enables users to add, edit and remove patterns.
The change is currently in master and pending review as a late feature for inclusion to the 3.6.2 release.
Example for the German de-DE locale:
Changes to the patterns become effective immediately after having confirmed and closed the dialog.
Update 2012-08-31T23:08+0200 : Editable Date Acceptance Patterns in LibreOffice
As explained in an earlier article a new feature will be available with LibreOffice 3.6 that limits date recognition of input to predefined locale dependent patterns to prevent erroneous detection of dates. To be able to input incomplete dates a locale needs date acceptance patterns defined in its locale data, quite a lot submissions of such patterns have already been included, but many locales do not have any pattern assigned yet. For these locales date input will only be possible as a complete date, no incomplete dates will be accepted. Maybe your locale should be enabled for incomplete date input but isn't yet? Then please submit the pattern(s), either as a comment to this blog post, or on the LibreOffice l10n mailing list if you are involved with LibO localization anyway, or simply mail me.
Locales without explicit DateAcceptancePattern elements:
(one implicit full date pattern is always generated)
ak_GH ar_DZ ar_EG ar_OM ast_ES az_AZ bn_IN bs_BA cv_RU da_DK de_AT de_CH de_LI de_LU dsb_DE dz_BT ee_GH el_GR en_AU en_CA en_GB en_GH en_JM en_NA en_ZA eo es_AR es_BO es_CL es_CO es_CR es_DO es_EC es_GT es_PE eu fa_IR fo_FO fr_CA fur_IT fy_NL gl_ES gsc_FR gug_PY ha_GH haw_US he_IL hi_IN hil_PH hr_HR hsb_DE ht_HT hu_HU hy_AM ia id_ID it_CH jbo ka_GE kk_KZ kl_GL km_KH ko_KR ku_TR ky_KG la_VA lb_LU lg_UG lif_NP ln_CD lo_LA ltg_LV lv_LV mai_IN mk_MK ml_IN mn_MN mt_MT my_MM myv_RU ne_NP no_NO oc_FR om_ET or_IN pjt_AU pl_PL plt_MG ro_RO rue_SK rw_RW sc_IT sg_CF shs_CA so_SO sr_RS sv_FI sv_SE sw_TZ tg_TJ th_TH ti_ER tk_TM tpi_PG ug_CN uk_UA ur_PK uz_UZ vi_VN wa_BE zh_HK zh_MO zh_SG
Locales with explicit DateAcceptancePattern elements:
If some of the entries seem to be duplicates within a locale and include spaces, that's because they are defined both with normal space and with breaking space to accommodate both input variants.
I'm going to the LibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest on April 14/15, what about you?
Meet the guys and gals and hack away your favorite itch.
One week of successful hacking at the Cambridge collaboration hackfest.
After I already struggled with Telepathy for some while, trying to implement DBus tubes over XMPP, Michael Meeks arranged a collaborative hackfest at Cambridge, where Collabora Ltd. is situated who to a large part are the maintainers of the Telepathy library. Nice to meet some of these guys (btw, if you happen to be in Cambridge and are into good Indian food go for the Golden Curry).
So last week Will Thompson from Collabora was set aside to work with us, who was of great help and immediately spotted why my tube acceptor never caught any offered tube, silly me, not spinning GMainLoop yet another time to wait for a specific state change ... Before, a connection to DBus could already be setup and a session between two contacts initiated and a tube offered, but I didn't get to the point where a tube was really established.
What we achieved from Tuesday to Thursday / Friday morning:
Kudos again to Will, who made the fast progress on the Telepathy bits possible. And Michael for tearing apart Calc's ScDocFunc. That I now have to glue together again somehow ;-)
All happens on the LibreOffice feature/tubes2 branch. You're more than welcome to help out, especially if you're familiar with Telepathy or like to implement some dialogs in VCL such as an account/contact picker or have ideas how to improve our bits. You might also be interested that further work on this topic is offered as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. There's plenty to do.
Btw, the next opportunity to collaboratively hack on collaboration would be at the Hamburg Hackfest on April 14/15 :-)
Update 2012-03-27T13:25+0200
Michael has some more details with bells and whistles and video over at his blog, video here: